Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, STATE OF THE ART NOV. 29, 2017
image from article
The internet is dying.
Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and
you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the
product of technologies created over decades through government funding and
academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the
tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.
Nope, that freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death — and a vote next
month by the Federal Communications Commission to undo net neutrality would be
the final pillow in its face.
Net neutrality is intended to prevent companies that provide internet service from offering preferential treatment to certain content over their lines. The rules
prevent, for instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to stream
high-definition videos to people.
Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix [JB emphasis].
If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital competition is already
pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting
swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and
monopolists.
The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google
and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to
operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful
of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are
also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all
the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.
Together these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless
innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of
some of the largest corporations on the planet.
Many companies feel this shift. In a letter to Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, who
drafted the net neutrality repeal order, more than 200 start-ups argued this week
that the order “would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and
prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground.” This, they said, was
“the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies
picking winners and losers instead of consumers.” This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At its deepest technical level, the internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The
designers of the internet understood that communications networks gain new
powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that
plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network.
This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically
explains why the internet led to so many more innovations than the centralized
networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.
The internet’s singular power, in its early gold-rush days, was its flexibility.
People could imagine a dazzling array of new uses for the network, and as quick as
that, they could build and deploy them — a site that sold you books, a site that
cataloged the world’s information, an application that let you “borrow” other
people’s music, a social network that could connect you to anyone.
You didn’t need permission for any of this stuff; some of these innovations
ruined traditional industries, some fundamentally altered society, and many were
legally dubious. But the internet meant you could just put it up, and if it worked, the rest of the world would quickly adopt it.
But if flexibility was the early internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled. In 2003,
Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The
New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing
internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and
faster internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes
network.
Some of the new uses of the internet threatened their bottom line. People were
using online services as an alternative to paying for cable TV or long-distance phone
service. They were connecting devices like Wi-Fi routers, which allowed them to
share their connections with multiple devices. At the time, there were persistent
reports of broadband companies seeking to block or otherwise frustrate these new
services; in a few years, some broadband providers would begin blocking new
services outright.
To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”
Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections,
some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since
2005. The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.
At the moment, broadband companies are promising not to act unfairly, and
they argue that undoing the rules would give them further incentive to invest in their
broadband capacity, ultimately improving the internet.
Brian Hart, an F.C.C. spokesman, said broadband companies would still be
covered by antitrust laws and other rules meant to prevent anticompetitive behavior.
He noted that Mr. Pai’s proposals would simply return the network to an earlier, pre-network-neutrality regulatory era.
“The internet flourished under this framework before, and it will again,” he said.
Broadband companies are taking a similar line. When I pointed out to a
Comcast spokeswoman that the company’s promises were only voluntary — that
nothing will prevent Comcast from one day creating special tiers of internet service
with bundled content, much like the way it now sells cable TV — she suggested I was
jumping the gun.
After all, people have been predicting the end of the internet for years. In 2003,
Michael Copps, a Democratically appointed commissioner on the F.C.C. who was
alarmed by the central choke points then taking command of the internet, argued
that “we could be witnessing the beginning of the end of the internet as we know it.”
It’s been a recurrent theme among worriers ever since. In 2014, the last time it
looked like net neutrality would get gutted, Nilay Patel, editor of the Verge, declared
the internet dead (he used another word for “dead”). And he did it again this year,
anticipating Mr. Pai’s proposal.
But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on
trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still
sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as
they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.
Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.
It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.
“But "whiteness” is an illusion. Because the crowned heads of Europe intermarried over centuries and because Spanish nobility was in the mix, and because in turn Spaniards and other southwestern Europeans are up to 20% North African in heritage as well as having substantial genetic endowments from Jews and various other Muslim peoples, not to mention Phoenicians and sub-saharan Africans– actually all European royal families have been mixed-race for a very long time. In fact, genealogists allege that Prince Harry is descended from the Prophet Muhammad ... . What I actually wish is that we could get rid of the ridiculous residual category of “white,” which was used by working class Catholics in a desperate bid to distinguish themselves from Latinos and African-Americans. But really. Why are Italian-Americans from Sicily “white” in America, but people from Latin America whose ancestors lived in Catalonia are “brown”? In the medieval era, for a while, both Catalonia and Sicily were in the same country, ruled by the crown of Aragon!
The popular press in America is confused about such issues because many writers do not realize that there is no such thing as race in the 19th century biological sense. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and by the time you get back to 1400 you have a million ancestors. For someone who hails from Europe, how likely is it that none of them were Arabs and Berbers from southern Spain who had been forced to convert and then married Catholics? Europe’s population in 1400 was only 78 million or so and they’re descended from a million of them. And Arabs in southern Spain were in turn intermarried with Berbers and Africans. After 50 generations (a generation is 24 years), most of the world’s genes get shared around. Everyone in the Mediterranean basin shares common ancestors from only a few thousand years ago, including Tunisians and Egyptians and Spanish and Italians.
Of course race is not completely an illusion. There are broad geographical races with some outward, phenotypical characteristics that mostly have to do with navigating between dangerous ultraviolet rays and the need for vitamin D. Other features have to do with climate (in cold places a longer nose insulates the brain from frigid air; in warm humid places that isn’t necessary). But mostly what Americans typically think of as “race” is actually culture. ...
Tracing the evolution of trade politics from mercantilism to the present, when Donald Trump has made trade controversial again. George Melloan reviews ‘Clashing Over Commerce’ by Douglas A. Irwin.
In 1789, James Madison addressed the first congress of the new American republic with these words: “I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce and hold it as a truth that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic.”
His free-trade views fitted the times. The American colonists had just waged a war to escape the trade burdens imposed by a mercantilist English ruling class. The Navigation Acts, enacted in the mid-17th century, required that colonists trade through Britain. The Tea Act of 1773 attempted to give the East India Co. a monopoly in the American colonies, a move that provoked the Boston Tea Party, ancestor of today’s libertarian tea party.
Fast forward and after over two centuries of ups and downs in trade politics, Americans have opted for the Madisonian view. The average duty on imports, after a relatively steady decline over the past 80 years, is now negligible. A 2017 Gallup Poll showed that 72% of Americans see trade as an opportunity and only 23% as a threat. The U.S. benefits from a modern global “free system of commerce” brought about by the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 and the comprehensive 1994 “Uruguay Round” multilateral compact, which broadly reduced barriers and liberalized international trade.
In “Clashing Over Commerce,” Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, outlines this long evolution of trade politics from the mercantilist 1640s to the present, when Donald Trump has made trade controversial again by arguing for a renewal of protectionist policies. Mr. Irwin’s chronicle—lengthy, detailed and readable—traces the winding trail that has brought us to the liberal world trading order we enjoy today.
Modern protectionist rhetoric didn’t begin with Mr. Trump, of course. Barack Obama used it to win labor votes during the 2008 campaign. Mr. Irwin quotes Mr. Obama declaring: “We can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests.” In office, he took a more liberal stance.
The early U.S. congresses favored free trade and levied tariffs only as the most efficient way to gain revenues, since they could be collected by merely a few customs officers in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. But industrialization brought demands from Northern factory owners and their congressmen for high tariffs to protect “infant industries,” like iron smelting. Protective tariffs on dutiable items soared in the mid-1820s to as high as 60%.
Mr. Irwin doesn’t find strong evidence that tariffs actually promoted development, but they certainly sowed conflict between North and South. Southern congressmen complained that tariffs were hurting the lucrative cotton export business by making it more difficult for Europeans to earn dollars with exports to the United States. South Carolina’s first threat to secede, in 1832, was made in objection to Northern tariffs. The Civil War crushed the South’s trade arguments and brought in a long period of Republican rule and protectionist policies.
The Republicans finally went too far with the 1930 protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which brought a precipitous drop in U.S. foreign trade and played a role in the Great Depression. When it comes to assigning blame for deepening the Depression, Mr. Irwin faults Smoot-Hawley less than the Federal Reserve’s policies. He endorses the view, advanced by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in the 1960s, that the Fed mishandled the deflation of the early 1930s by failing to increase the money supply. He notes, however, that the late monetary specialist Allan Meltzer gave Smoot-Hawley more of the blame. Of course, both the Fed and Congress earned low marks.
In 1932, voters cast the offending Republicans into the outer darkness, where they would live for 20 years, and the New Deal’s Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 ushered in a series of bilateral agreements that gradually improved America’s trade posture. The act also, Mr. Irwin notes, gave the president a greater role in negotiating deals.
After World War II, both political parties saw it as imperative to rebuild Europe in order to ward off Russian imperialism. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, in the late 1940s, set up a new trade framework, and American investment flowed into Western Europe, launching a new wave of internationalism. In the mid-1960s, negotiations began on what came to be known as the Kennedy Round, introducing an era of broad trade-liberalization agreements.
By the 1990s, in another twist, the Republicans had become the dominant free-trade party, and it served them well. Democrat Bill Clinton was well disposed toward free trade, but his party, more heavily wedded to protectionist unions, was less so. In 1993, the Nafta agreement passed Congress but only with the help of 132 Republican votes in the House and 34 in the Senate.
So where are we today? Mr. Obama supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations that began in 2011 and, a couple of years later, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. In 2017, Mr. Trump dropped out of both and began his attack on Nafta. That stance has earned him strong opposition from the farm and auto lobbies, both of which profit from an integrated North American trading system. Today’s question is whether Mr. Trump represents a turning away from free trade by Americans. The polls that Mr. Irwin cites suggest not. He finished his book at the outset of the Trump presidency and wasn’t sure how much Trump talk was serious and how much bluster. Although he doesn’t say so outright, he implies that he is still hopeful about preserving a liberal trade order, despite Mr. Trump. Certainly James Madison’s argument for it is still sound. Mr. Melloan, a former deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is the author of “Free People, Free Markets: How the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America.”
His style of deal-making prizes uncertainty and brinkmanship, without a plan for what comes next.
One of America’s senior statesmen predicted earlier this year that Donald Trump’s hunger for success would push the president toward a more traditional foreign policy. I countered that it depends on how Mr. Trump defines success. We now have an answer: Mr. Trump’s foreign policy reflects his instinct for political realignment at home, based on celebrity populism.
Populist movements feed off grievances and impatience with traditional politics. Frustrations—whether generated by economic distress, social displacement, or cultural challenges—fuel skepticism about institutions and elites. Challengers (who want to become the new elite) attack traditional leaders as out of touch, incompetent and corrupt.
Mr. Trump rallies his supporters by proclaiming the three presumptions of populism. First, it professes to reflect the will of a scorned people. Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables.” The will of the people is intolerant of the give-and-take of pluralism and disdains the identity politics of the Democratic Party. Second, populism finds and blames enemies, domestic or foreign, who thwart the people’s will. Mr. Trump has mastered insulting such scapegoats.
Third, populism needs “the leader,” who can identify with and embody the will of the people. Like other populist leaders, Mr. Trump attacks the allegedly illegitimate institutions that come between him and the people. His solutions, like those of other populists, are simple. He contends that the establishment uses complexity to obfuscate and cover up misdeeds and mistakes. He claims he will use his deal-making know-how to get results without asking the public to bear costs.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policies serve his political purposes, not the nation’s interests. He says the U.S. needs to build a wall to keep Mexicans at bay—and Mexico will pay for it. He asserted he would block Muslims from coming to America to harm us. His protectionist trade policies are supposed to stop foreigners from creating deficits, stealing jobs, and enriching the corporate elite. Mr. Trump also asserts that U.S. allies have been sponging off America. The U.S. military is supposed to hammer enemies and not bother with the cleanup—even if the result, for example in Syria, is an empowered axis of Iran, Shiite militias, Hezbollah and Bashar Assad’s regime.
The president’s emphasis on discontinuity—breaking things—demonstrates action while disparaging his predecessors. He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but the other 11 countries are proceeding without the U.S. He wants to destroy the North American Free Trade Agreement and strangle the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement; he also is threatening the World Trade Organization’s rules and system for settling disputes. His style of deal-making prizes uncertainty and brinkmanship, which risks escalation, without a plan for what comes next.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy represents a break from postwar presidents of both parties, reaching back to Harry S. Truman. Other presidents led an alliance system that recognizes U.S. security is connected to mutual interests in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East. Past presidents believed that the U.S. economy would prosper in a world of expanding capitalism, governed by adaptive rules and practices that matched America’s competitive and dynamic markets. Over time, U.S. foreign policy strove to expand human rights, liberty and democracy. Mr. Trump dismisses this U.S.-led international system as outdated, too costly and too restrictive of his case-by-case deal-making. The 70-year-old U.S. foreign policy architecture has been grounded in institutions. But Mr. Trump disdains America’s intelligence agencies and is dismantling the State Department. His foils at home are the courts, the press, a clumsy Congress beholden to antiquated procedures, and even his own Justice Department.
Mr. Trump’s recent trip to Asia reveals that foreigners have taken his measure. They play to his narcissism. He in turn basks in their attention, diminishes his own country by blaming past presidents, and preens with promises of great but unspecified things to come. Other countries are preparing for a world in which they can expect U.S. demands but can no longer rely on American leadership.
The president’s need to project an image of personal power—for his domestic audience and his ego—makes him more comfortable with authoritarian leaders. Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte have noticed, as has part of the Saudi royal family. Democratic leaders, accountable to public opinion, face a more complex choice: They can keep their distance and risk Mr. Trump’s ire or try to manipulate him through frequent attention, royal treatment, golf and courtship of the family.
Yet Mr. Trump’s ride on the populist wave—and the foreign policy that matches his politics—faces a big obstacle: Most Americans do not agree with his approach. Significant majorities prefer the fundamentals of the foreign policies Mr. Trump is deconstructing, according to a 2017 survey of American adults from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Sixty percent say alliances with Europe and East Asia either are mutually beneficial or mostly benefit the U.S. Record numbers say international trade is good for consumers (78%), the economy (72%) and job creation (57%). Some 65% support providing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and only 37% characterize immigration as a critical threat. All these numbers have shifted against Mr. Trump’s positions since the election.
Elected Republicans face a moment of decision. Voters with a very favorable view of Mr. Trump are moving toward protectionism and against alliances and immigration. Mr. Trump’s Republican Party pits nationalism against America’s internationalism, whereas for 70 years GOP leaders saw them as two sides of a coin.
Democratic leaders face a challenge as well. Their voters, especially younger ones, increasingly support trade, according to Chicago Council data. Democrats will need to decide whether to compete with Mr. Trump’s isolationist economic nationalism or offer a new vision of American leadership.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy represents a change of type, not simply degree. Previous populist impulses in the U.S. ran their course, creating opportunities for adaptation, not simply disruption. Patriotic Republican and Democratic leaders must challenge Mr. Trump’s foreign-policy destruction. Political defeat is not the same as ideological defeat. The debate over ideas is just beginning.
Mr. Zoellick is a former World Bank president, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.
Now (and doubtless before 2017, as meticulous researchers probably did not fail to note), the end of the end of history, rather than the end of history, has become the headline du jour... See, for example, a recent piece in the WSJ by a Bard professor. Waiter, please order me a "end of history" -- no need to chill it.
Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 27, 2017 6:37 p.m. ET [JB note: A rare, not overly enthusiastic, "defense" of Trump's foreign "policy" by a serious academic]
Image from article, with caption:President Donald Trump in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Nov. 15.
The goal now is less to make dreams come true than to keep nightmares at bay.
Forget the tweets, the gaffes and the undiplomatic asides. The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership.
It’s a compelling indictment: Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the Paris Accord, “restructuring” the State Department with a chain saw, dumping the Pacific trade deal, and abdicating on human rights while cozying up to authoritarians. The whole of the damage being done to America’s standing is greater than the sum of his tweets.
On the other hand, those hardy souls who defend the administration argue Mr. Trump is so smart that his critics can’t fathom the method to his apparent madness. The naysayers, as this theory has it, are playing checkers, while Mr. Trump is winning at chess.
The truth, as always, is more complicated. Mr. Trump is not the second coming of Bismarck, and his temperament, education and experience have not prepared him to steer American foreign policy at a difficult time. But there is a pattern if not a method to his moves. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.
What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp: that America’s post-Cold War national strategy has run out of gas. During the period of confidence and giddy optimism that followed the Soviet Union’s fall, the list of “important” American foreign-policy goals expanded dramatically.
Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered.
Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump’s 2016 rivals—both Republican and Democratic—to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism [JB emphasis] helped put him in the White House. Although the president’s antiglobalist and mercantilist instincts blind him to some realities, they enable him to grasp three significant truths.
First, Mr. Trump knows that the post-Cold War policies can no longer be politically sustained. Second, he knows that China poses a new and dangerous challenge to American interests. Third, he sees that foreign policy must change in response. The old approach—on everything from trade and development, to military deployments and readiness, to religious freedom and women’s issues—must be reassessed in the light of today’s dangerous world.
For years foreign-policy thinking was dominated by the idea that the end of the Cold War meant the “end of history” [JB see]—the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal world order. This belief shaped a generation of intellectuals and practitioners. But history isn’t over, and American foreign policy needs to come back to earth.The U.S. isn’t putting the finishing touches on a peaceful global system that is fated to endure for the ages. For the foreseeable future, foreign policy is going to be less about making dreams come true and more about keeping nightmares at bay.
Mr. Trump’s critics retort that committing to advance human rights and fight climate change wraps American power in a mantle of legitimacy and promotes cooperation from allies. The costs for failure in these areas will only grow. Moreover, some of Mr. Trump’s moves, like walking away from the Pacific trade deal, strengthen China at America’s expense.
Fair enough. American foreign policy must ultimately stand for something greater than itself. If FDR could proclaim the Four Freedoms in the depths of World War II, then a president today should be able to articulate a larger goal than “MAGA.” Mr. Trump does not appear to understand the importance of trade policy to building alliances and, therefore, American security. One can add that American security rests in large part on whether other countries believe they can count on Washington’s word. Erratic tweets and impulsive flights of rhetoric undercut that confidence. In steering American foreign policy away from the inflated expectations and unrealistic objectives produced by the end of history mirage, the Trump administration is performing a much-needed service. But it is not enough to demolish the old. Ultimately Mr. Trump will be judged on his ability—or failure—to build something better.
Mr. Mead is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College.
A hundred years after the revolution, Ukraine’s leaders are reshaping its historical legacy to their own political ends. A more honest historical reckoning is needed to move the country forward.
When George Kennan was asked in 1967 by Foreign Affairs to reflect on the accomplishments and failures of Soviet rule at the 50-year mark, he stated that without a doubt, the October Revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia had altered world history and was the single most consequential event of the 20th century. Indeed, at any point before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it was difficult to exaggerate the enormity of the events of 1917.
Much has been written in hindsight about how this seemingly indomitable Soviet colossus actually stood on feet of clay, fooling both the West and its own leadership. After 74 years of Soviet rule, not a single post-communist state has reverted back to an embrace of Marxism. Lenin and his ideology have been relegated to the museum, never to return. There are still communist parties in the former Soviet space, but they appeal to the youthful nostalgia of pensioners and a kind of Red conservatism, which has little in common with the Marxist-Leninist tenets that once inspired revolution and policy from Havana to Hanoi.
A hundred years after the revolution, the ideological hold of communism is long gone. But the state built by the Bolsheviks—communism’s concrete manifestation—has quietly survived to this day. And as much as its current leaders are loath to admit it, Ukraine is no exception.
In Russia, the centenary of the revolution was met with a mix of indifference, attempts at reconciliation, and a certain grotesque carnival flair typical of Putin’s Russia. Putin opened Moscow’s first monument to victims of Stalin’s Terror while Russia’s aging communist-in-chief, Gennady Zyuganov, announcedthat he was seeking the presidency for the fifth time. He did this shortly after making a speech urging his followers to heed the wisdom of Stalin, while attending an Orthodox-themed event at a cathedral that Stalin had once demolished. The Kremlin’s terse statement that there would be no official commemorations of the anniversary, meanwhile, pointed to the unwillingness of Russia’s ruling establishment to publicly wade into a period of tumult and collapse of state authority. The Kremlin’s idealized version of Russia’s history would no doubt skip the entire period between Alexander III and Stalin.
In Ukraine, the centenary was approached in a different manner, albeit a no less problematic one. For Ukrainians who have recently lived through the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in the Donbas, the events of a hundred years ago do not seem like ancient history. Ukrainians are all too familiar with the power of protests, and know from recent experience that popular unrest can lead to revolutionary change from below, forcing political elites and foreign powers to reckon with events outside their control.
Speaking broadly about the anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution and the Civil War period, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said that the erstwhile Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) failed because it could not unite the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression. Moscow was thus able to exploit internal divisions to take control of Ukraine. He went on to say that the lessons from 1917-21 still have bearing for today’s Ukraine and that if past Ukrainian leaders like Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, or Symon Petliura could travel to the future, they would deliver a stern warning to Ukraine’s current crop of officials about curbing their own political infighting.
The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, first set up in the 2000s to research contentious and heavily politicized issues in modern Ukrainian history but lately engaging in crude revisionist history of its own, offered a similar analysis. According to the Institute’s chairman Volodymyr Viatrovych, the Ukrainian Revolution was an effort to defend Ukraine from Bolshevik invasion, which was tantamount to the Russian aggression that persists to the present day.
Ukraine is a pluralistic society where neither Poroshenko’s nor Viatrovych’s views necessarily reflect the majority opinion on the events of 1917. But their voices are influential ones, and their interpretation disguises the fact that the current Ukrainian state is at best only loosely related to the Ukrainian National Republic. Far more palpable was the influence of the Bolsheviks, who remolded Ukraine both according to their long-term ideological aims and immediate political considerations.
Decades of Soviet propaganda and mythmaking, combined with the post-Soviet turn towards nationalism and romanticization of the anti-Bolshevik groups, have distorted the facts surrounding the Ukrainian Revolution and subsequent civil war. The short-lived iterations of the Ukrainian government from 1917-21 were in no position to engage in any sort of serious nation-building. Only the conservative government of Pavlo Skoropadskyi attempted to build institutions and promote the Ukrainian language, but even he was forced to rely on former Tsarist officials. Literacy was still low at the time, and for the predominantly agrarian society, all sides to the conflict were a source of great misery as they carried out grain requisitions and implemented forced conscription.
The Ukrainian government, despite its initial democratic-socialist leanings, began to heavily favor the old landed elites and greatly alienated the peasants. The Whites, with their rigid pro-Russian nationalism, fared no better in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasantry. The peasants were also skeptical of the Bolsheviks, with many viewing the Civil War as an unnecessary fratricide, but they wished to preserve the gains of land reform that occurred in 1917. In the hungry years of 1918 and 1919, lawlessness and violence became widespread. Troops loyal to the Ukrainian government, the Whites, Makhno’s anarchists, and the Reds all committed reprisals against the local population, including anti-Semitic pogroms.
The success of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine cannot be attributed only to the infighting among the opposition. Operating initially from a position of weakness and forced to rely primarily on guerilla tactics in Ukraine, the pro-Soviet groups were able to forge a temporary alliance with the anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, whose troops had occupied most of southeastern Ukraine and managed to check both the Kyiv-backed forces and the Whites. When the Red Army advanced, they created a new military administration whose reach far surpassed even the old Tsarist bureaucracy. The Red Army, faced with a constant need for new conscripts, adopted a comprehensive system of registering individuals at the village level to combat desertion and evasion from a war-weary population.
Coercion went hand in hand with a propaganda effort that no other party to the conflict could match. Unlike the Whites, the Reds published propaganda materials extensively in Ukrainian and wasted little time in removing old Tsarist symbols of Russification. In their place, new monuments were erected to Ukrainian revolutionaries and national icons such as the poet Taras Shevchenko. The impact of these policies on the Ukrainian countryside was probably modest, since many peasants lacked a cogent ethnic consciousness, but they did help court Ukrainian intellectuals in the cities. The Bolsheviks were also greatly aided in the rise of anti-foreign sentiment after both the German occupation in 1918 and the Polish intervention in 1919.
Just as Soviet Russia broke with the ancien régime, so did Ukraine. Much of the local Tsarist elite either fled, were impoverished, or were killed during the Civil War. Ukraine’s intellectuals also emigrated, although some would later return to the Soviet Union and pay dearly during Stalin’s Terror. War communism and conscription necessitated a deeply hierarchical system that would later be reinforced with more layers of control in the 1930s. At the same time, until Stalin solidified his control, there was a significant degree of independent thinking among Ukrainian communists. A separate Ukrainian Communist Party independent of the Bolsheviks survived until 1925.
The Bolsheviks viewed the question of nationalities as crucial to the long-term success of the revolution. As a result, they launched an impressive campaign of korenizatsiya (nativization) to promote literacy, native cadres, and the use of local languages. As a result of Soviet policies promoting urbanization, cities in Ukraine became predominantly Ukrainian. After being banned with various degrees of severity under the Tsarist period, there was an explosion in Ukrainian-language magazines and newspapers. Korenizatsiya eventually caused Stalin and his acolytes to suspect growing Ukrainian nationalism among Ukrainian party members and was reversed in the 1930s, but it undeniably had a substantial role in strengthening a sense of Ukrainian identity. It likely contributed to the fierce resistance that Stalin’s forced collectivization policies set off throughout Ukraine in 1930.
These are not esoteric arguments over the historical record. Since 2014, Ukraine has embarked on a thorough campaign of “decommunization” where Soviet symbols and monuments have been taken down. Cities and streets bearing names of Soviet figures have been renamed, with only a handful of exceptions. Indeed, one of the most symbolic events of the protests in Kyiv in 2014 was the toppling of the Lenin statue in the city center.
Monuments are an easy target: they cannot adapt to the vicissitudes of prevailing public opinion, and they often serve as glaring holdovers of the previous order that would-be revolutionaries want to do away with. The problem is that the monuments are only the most visible part of the much deeper and ubiquitous influence of the Soviet period on the modern Ukrainian state.The problem is that the monuments are only the most visible part of the much deeper and ubiquitous influence of the Soviet period on the modern Ukrainian state.
When the Bolsheviks set out to create a Soviet Ukraine, they remolded and shaped everything from the arts and education to labor unions, military institutions, and the penitentiary. Some of the Bolsheviks’ lasting legacies are easy to discern today—Ukraine’s modern delineated borders—while others are subliminal, such as the continued influence of the Soviet legal system on Ukraine’s judiciary.
Millions of ethnic Ukrainians earnestly took part in the Soviet experiment. As they were building a new state, policies such as korenizatsiya increased the prestige of the Ukrainian language and facilitated the creation of a stronger Ukrainian ethnic identity. Ukrainian Soviet leaders like Mykola Skrypnyk, the Head of the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat and largely forgotten today, had a clear vision for a distinctly Ukrainian national communism. The man in the Kremlin had different plans. Stalin would drive Skrypnyk to suicide and unleash a thorough purge of the party ranks in Ukraine. His collectivization policy led to the Holodomor, a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Although Stalin undoubtedly bears the greatest share of responsibility for the Holodomor, local party and village activists who carried out the policies also share culpability that should not be overlooked.
Discussing these dark chapters in Ukrainian history is painful, but it is more constructive than propagating false or simplified narratives. By moving away from simple monikers of “Ukrainian heroes” and “Russian or Soviet villains,” Ukraine can finally come to terms with its past, embrace its contradictory origins, and blunt the effect of modern Russian propaganda directed against Ukraine. Moreover, Ukraine’s society, with its heightened sense of civic consciousness after the 2014 revolution and the war in Donbas, would be quite receptive to a more nuanced national narrative. If Ukraine is to succeed in its reform efforts, it must have an honest conversation about its origins.
Alexander Gauland, a leader of the Alternative für Deutschland; illustration by Wilfried Kahrs from qpress.de, a German left-wing satirical blog run by Kahrs
“The reason we are inundated by culturally alien [kulturfremden] peoples such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma etc. is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight to the enemies-of-the-constitution by whom we are ruled. These pigs are nothing other than puppets of the victor powers of the Second World War….” Thus begins a 2013 personal e-mail from Alice Weidel, who in this autumn’s pivotal German election was one of two designated “leading candidates” of the Alternative für Deutschland (hereafter AfD or the Alternative). The chief “pig” and “puppet” was, of course, Angela Merkel. Despite the publication of this leaked e-mail two weeks before election day, adding to other widely publicized evidence of AfD leaders’ xenophobic, right-wing nationalist views, one in eight German voters gave the Alternative their support. It is now the second-largest opposition party in the Bundestag, with ninety-two MPs.
Xenophobic right-wing nationalism—in Germany of all places? The very fact that observers express surprise indicates how much Germany has changed since 1945. These days, we expect more of Germany than of ourselves. For, seen from one point of view, this is just Germany partaking in the populist normality of our time, as manifested in the Brexit vote in Britain, Marine le Pen’s Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s blond beastliness in the Netherlands, the right-wing nationalist-populist government in Poland, and Trumpery in the US.
Like all contemporary populisms, the German version exhibits both generic and specific features. In common with other populisms, it denounces the current elites (Alteliten in AfD-speak) and established parties (Altparteien) while speaking in the name of the Volk, a word that, with its double meaning of people and ethno-culturally defined nation, actually best captures what Trump and Le Pen mean when they say “the people.” In Angst für Deutschland, her vividly reported book about the party, Melanie Amann, a journalist at the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, notes how some of its activists have appropriated the slogan of the East German protests against Communist rule in 1989: Wir sind das Volk—We are the people. Like other populists, Germany’s attack the mainstream media (Lügenpresse, the “lying press”) while making effective use of social media. On the eve of the election, the Alternative had some 362,000 Facebook followers, compared with the Social Democrats’ 169,000 and just 154,000 for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Its criticism of globalization is familiar, as is its angry and self-congratulatory denunciation of political correctness. Typical of all European populisms is a negative attitude toward the EU in general and the euro in particular. The Alternative started life in 2013 as an anti-euro party. Although overall German support for the EU is still very strong, a poll conducted for the Bertelsmann foundation in the summer of 2017 found that 50 percent of those respondents who identified themselves as on the “right” (carefully distinguished from the “center-right”) would vote for Germany to leave the EU, if Germans were offered a Brexit-style in-or-out referendum. This is a remarkable finding. Unlike Brexit, Germexit would be the end of the European Union.
Tiresomely familiar to any observer of Trump, Brexit, or Wilders is the demagogic appeal to emotions while playing fast and loose with facts. In Amann’s account, the predominant emotion here is Angst. Her book cover picks out the AfD’s initials in her title, Angst für Deutschland. She quotes the Angstindex of an insurance company reporting in mid-2016 that “never before have ‘fears grown so drastically within one year’”—the leading fears now being terrorist attacks, political extremism, and “tensions resulting from the arrival of foreigners.”
The dramatic influx of nearly 1.2 million refugees in 2015–2016 is the single most direct cause of the Alternative’s electoral success. Its leaders denounce Merkel for opening Germany’s frontiers in September 2015 to the massed refugees then being made thoroughly unwelcome in Viktor Orbán’s xenophobic populist Hungary. Following last year’s Islamist terror attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, in which twelve were killed, one AfD leader tweeted: “these are Merkel’s dead.”
Besides the refugee influx, there are other features peculiar to German populism. For eight of the last twelve years, Germany has been governed by a so-called Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats—Merkel’s CDU in a loveless parliamentary marriage with the more conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)—and Social Democrats. This has impelled disgruntled voters toward the smaller parties and the extremes. The effect has been reinforced by Merkel’s woolly centrist version of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative), perfectly captured in the German word alternativlos (without alternatives). It’s no accident that this protest party is called the Alternative.
The Alternative scores best in what we still loosely call East Germany, that is, the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. There is a striking inverse correlation between the number of immigrants (or people of migrant origin) in an area and the populist vote: East Germany has the fewest immigrants and the most AfD voters. As one participant in a demonstration organized by the far right, xenophobic movement Pegida (the initials stand for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) told a reporter: “In Saxony today there are hardly any immigrants, but there is a danger of the Islamization of Germany in fifty or a hundred years.” An urgent matter, then.
It would require a longer essay to explore the collective psychology of this East German vote, but its ingredients certainly include the poisonous legacy of a society behind the Berlin Wall that was anything but open and multicultural. There is also a resentful feeling among East Germans that they have been treated as second-class citizens in united Germany: not given enough attention, not paid due respect. When a street protest in a small town in Saxony was totally ignored by the visiting Chancellor Merkel, a protester complained, “She doesn’t look at us even with her ass!” One can imagine a Trump voter saying something similar about Hillary Clinton. In explaining the populist vote in many countries, the inequality of attention is at least as important as economic inequality.
And then, to add insult to injury, these bloody foreigners—Muslims to boot!—are welcomed in Germany with open arms and “get everything for nothing.” As in other European welfare states, the knowledge that “everything” includes generous welfare provisions only sharpens the resentment.
Unlike in Britain and America, economic factors play only a small part here. It’s not just that Germany as a whole is doing well economically. In a 2016 poll, four out of five AfD voters described their personal economic situation as “good” or “very good.” This is not a party of the economically “left behind.” It gathers the discontented from every walk of life, but those who predominate in its ranks are educated, middle-class men. A leading CDU politician told me that the angry protest letters he gets from defectors to the Alternative will typically be from a doctor, businessman, lawyer, or professor. This strong presence of the educated upper middle class distinguishes German populism from many other populisms.
Among the leaders of the party, they are visibly represented by its other designated “leading candidate,” Alexander Gauland, a seventy-six-year-old former CDU functionary who almost invariably wears a check-patterned tweedy jacket and dark green tie. He is one of those elderly conservative gents who look so English that you know they must be German.Then there is Beatrix von Storch, a shrill and tiresome minor aristocrat with neoliberal, Hayekian intellectual pretensions. (Her maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister—but we are not responsible for our grandfathers.) As for Alice Weidel: this former Goldman Sachs and Allianz asset manager, white, blonde, always neatly turned out in business attire, lives just across the border in Switzerland, in a same-sex relationship with a Swiss filmmaker of Sinhalese heritage and two adopted sons. These are not the German equivalent of the American rust belt manual worker, or of what is known in England, with liberal condescension, as “white van man.” (The van is white as well as the man.)
“It’s the economy, stupid” simply does not apply to Germany’s populist voters. Rather, it’s the Kultur. (I say Kultur, rather than simply culture, because the German word implies both culture and ethno-cultural identity, and has traditionally been counterposed to liberal, cosmopolitan Zivilisation.)In a poll shown on German television on election night, 95 percent of AfD voters said they were very worried that “we are experiencing a loss of German culture and language,” 94 percent that “our life in Germany will change too much,” and 92 percent that “the influence of Islam in Germany will become too strong.” Feeding this politics of cultural despair—to recall a famous phrase of the historian Fritz Stern—is a milieu of writers, media, and books whose arguments and vocabulary connect back to themes of an earlier German right-wing culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This is a new German right with distinct echoes of the old.
Amann shows how a publisher and ideological activist of the new right, Götz Kubitschek, played a significant behind-the-scenes part in the development of the party. She quotes a blog post from the very first weeks of the then primarily anti-euro party’s existence, in which Kubitschek describes hostility to the euro as “the door-opener theme” after which “our themes (identity, resistance, gender-, party- and ideology-criticism) will come rumbling through, so long as we quickly and consistently put our foot in the door.” And so it came to pass—thanks to the refugee crisis. Kubitschek was instrumental in promoting the party career of an East German history teacher called Björn Höcke, whose plangent rhetoric of cultural pessimism and völkisch nationalism would have been entirely at home in the 1920s—except that now the scapegoats are Muslims rather than Jews. Höcke told a gathering of the Alternative’s youth wing that, because of Germany’s low birthrate and mass immigration, “for the first time in a thousand years the question is posed of Finis Germaniae [the end of Germany].”
Interestingly, Amann begins the party’s story not with the euro or the refugee crisis, but with a magazine interview given in 2009 by Thilo Sarrazin, then a director of the Bundesbank, and his subsequent book, Germany Abolishes Itself. As I noted in these pages at the time,bien pensant German opinion leaders first ignored and then deplored his sub-Spenglerian tract about the forthcoming Islamic swamping of Germany—but it sold 1.2 million copies in less than nine months.1 In his cellar, Sarrazin keeps folders stuffed with thousands of letters of support: “I would like to express my unconditional respect for your unvarnished remarks about the Turks.” “When shall we at last kick out those who neither speak German nor want to, but only hold out their hands?” And “it’s terrible that one can no longer tell the truth in Germany!”
Seven years later, in the run-up to this fall’s election, controversy erupted around another angry and angst-ridden book. Like the Sarrazin affair, this latest storm is interesting not just for the ideas expressed by the author, but also for how democratic Germany responds to hateful echoes of its pre-1945 past.
A strange thing happened on the afternoon of July 20, 2017, the seventy-third anniversary of the German resistance’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. If you looked up the Spiegel nonfiction best-seller list on Amazon there was a hole in sixth place, between Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature in fifth place and Penguin Bloom: The Little Bird That Saved Our Family at number seven. Subsequently, Penguin Bloom was silently lifted up to sixth place, number eight became number seven, and so on. The previous number-six best seller, a book called Finis Germania by Rolf Peter Sieferle, had simply disappeared.
What was going on? Had there been an embarrassing mistake in tabulating the bookshop sales that form the basis of the Spiegel best-seller list? Not at all. Finis Germania (a weirdly ungrammatical version of Finis Germaniae)was selling away. But the top editors of Der Spiegel had decided that such a nasty piece of work should not appear on their list. They were embarrassed that it had shot to prominence because one of their own journalists, Johannes Saltzwedel, had earlier placed it on a widely noticed list of recommendedbooks carried by North German Radio and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal daily. The controversy around that list seemed to have led people to buy Finis Germania in larger numbers.
Sieferle’s book was, explained Spiegel deputy editor Susanne Beyer, “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, and historically revisionist,” and sincethe news magazinesees itself as a “medium of Enlightenment,” and the best-seller listing might be mistaken for a recommendation, they had removed it. So Finis Germania was consigned to an Orwellian memory hole, made an unbook. It was not a best seller. It had never been a best seller. Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf—for what may not be, cannot be—as the poet Christian Morgenstern once put it.
Predictably, the effect was the opposite of that intended. There was another storm of controversy around this bizarre decision, and even more people bought the book. The publisher was laughing all the way to the bank—and to this autumn’s Frankfurt book fair, where he invited the AfD pocket-Spengler Björn Höcke to speak at the Antaios publishing house stand, thus generating another round of indignation, protest, and even more publicity. The publisher was none other than that new-right string-puller Götz Kubitschek, who, from his base in a village in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, had played a significant part in the party’s völkisch turn. To cap it all, the book has a postscript by a friend of Sieferle’s that describes the refugee crisis of 2015 as “internationally long since planned, and…triggered by the German Chancellor in the manner of a putsch.”
So the whole new-right packaging of Sieferle’s text stinks to high heaven. But why is the postscript written by a friend rather than the author? Because in the autumn of 2016 Sieferle committed suicide, hanging himself in the attic of his Heidelberg villa. He never sent Finis Germania to a publisher. That was done by his wife and friends, who found it on his computer, along with another book-length text, now published as Das Migrationsproblem: Über die Unvereinbarkeit von Sozialstaat und Masseneinwanderung (The Migration Problem: On the Incompatibility of the Welfare State and Mass Immigration). They interpreted the fact that Sieferle had carefully tidied up the electronic files as meaning he intended these texts for publication. But who knows? Perhaps he did not know himself.
The story of Rolf Peter Sieferle is a sad one. Generationally a ’68er, and briefly part of the 1968 student protest movement, he was a highly cultured loner and academic oddball, with a fine, provocative turn of phrase. He made a modest reputation with a book called Der unterirdische Wald (The Underground Forest),published in 1982, which described the modern world’s plundering of millennia of carbon deposits to make coal and oil. Its title rather brilliantly blended the then-new West German Green concerns and the age-old German cultural fascination with the forest, the Wald. In 1994 he produced Epochenwechsel: Die Deutschen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert (Turn of the Epochs: The Germans on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century). This already anticipated some of the themes of Finis Germania, including a provocative critique of the way in which Germany’s treatment of its Nazi past supposedly puts the subject beyond rational debate.
A year later came Die Konservative Revolution (The Conservative Revolution), an argument built around biographical sketches of five right-wing German thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, including Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. While Sieferle’s work at this time was still written in an academic style (and contemporary German academic style is no laughing matter), one senses his aesthetic fascination with his subjects’ stormy, sweeping, no-holds-barred manner of writing—one he would make his own in Finis Germania twenty years later.
All these books were published by respectable publishers, to mixed reviews. It is said that Sieferle was deeply hurt because Epochenwechsel was not received as the major work he believed it to be. Rather late in life he became a full professor, but he was rarely seen at conferences and never part of the academic mainstream. By 2015, his cultural pessimism seems to have deepened into a kind of existential despair, exacerbated by serious health problems—reportedly he was suffering from cancer and losing his sight.
After the controversy erupted this year, some of his friends retrospectively told a writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) that in the last years of his life Sieferle had become isolated and embittered. But his widow wrote an angry letter to the FAZ , rejecting this tendentially apologetic (“he was a sick man”) explanation and insisting that already in the 1990s, in Epochenwechsel, he had taken a “national conservative position.” It seems plausible that both biographical strands, the ideological and the personal, combined to give Finis Germania its bitter and biting tone.
This is the background against which we must read Sieferle’s book, a mere one hundred small-format pages of loosely connected short essays. In sound, they echo Friedrich Nietzsche, and in fury, Ernst Jünger, who is the ostensible subject of one section. Several passages are beyond parody, like a Monty Python version of an early-twentieth-century cultural pessimist walking the streets of twenty-first-century Germany. There are “tragic” nations, he informs us, such as the Russians, Jews, and Germans, and “untragic” ones, above all the Anglo-Saxons. I must confess to laughing out loud at his lament about “the sensually perceptible presence of nihilistic relativity in every pedestrian zone.” Nietzsche prowls amid the weekend shoppers of Heidelberg.
Murat Tueremis/laif/Redux
The opening session of the new Bundestag, Berlin, October 24 , 2017. Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland (with hands raised) are seated in the first row of the Alternative für Deutschland section.
Then there are the sections about contemporary Germany’s attitude toward its Nazi past, which account for most of the controversy. Here Sieferle takes to an extreme his argument in Epochenwechsel that Germany has frozen its Nazi past, and Auschwitz, into a kind of absolute negative myth, marked by ritualized, increasingly empty expressions of Betroffenheit (only weakly translatable as a sense of intense personal dismay), and thereby separated from everything else in contemporary German life. “National Socialism, more precisely Auschwitz, has become the last myth of a thoroughly rationalized world,” he writes, in one of many deliberately provocative formulations. “A myth is a truth that is beyond discussion.” This puts the Jews beyond criticism, and turns the German, or at least the “eternal Nazi,” into “the secularized devil of an enlightened present.” (AfD ideologues more crudely call this the Schuldkult, the guilt cult.)
Sieferle writes with a kind of wild determination to say exactly what he thinks, however publicly unacceptable (and remember, we don’t definitely know that he intended this for publication). He argues that Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the familiar West German term for “overcoming” a difficult past—has become a kind of state religion, in which the Germans are forever the negative chosen people and the Jews the positive chosen people. “The first commandment reads: thou shalt have no other holocaust besides me.” And again: “Adam Hitler is not transcended by any Jesus; and such a Jesus”—one involuntarily wonders: Does he mean himself?—“would surely be rapidly crucified. The guilt remains total, is compensated by no divine mercy.” This is hysterical stuff.
Sieferle reaches far too often for Nietzsche-like profundity and usually misses the mark, tripping over his own rhetorical shoelaces into a puddle of absurdity. But occasionally, when he pulls together his life’s work on modernity, ecology, and German history, a genuinely thought-provoking formulation emerges. Referring to the “project of the modern,” he writes that “the history of the projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is, then, one of a total failure, which became apparent in the twentieth century: morally, from World War to Auschwitz, technologically and economically, in the environmental crisis of the end of the century.” (Not, I think, the remark of an Auschwitz denier or routine anti-Semite.) And again: “The twentieth century can be seen as a period of vast profligacy…profligate with everything: with natural resources, but also with people, with ideas, with cultural reserves.”
FinisGermania raises in helpfully sharp form the question of how one should respond to such ideas, in a country where one in eight voters just chose a right-wing populist party, motivated mainly by concerns about culture and identity.
DerSpiegel’sextraordinary vaporizing of Sieferle’s book from its best-seller list is an extreme example of an approach characteristic of contemporary Germany. If you go beyond a certain point in expressing what may be seen as right-wing extremist or anti-Semitic views, you are banished from all respectable society, branded with a scarlet, or rather a brown, letter. Nazi insignia, Holocaust denial, and hate speech are banned by law (as Facebook is finding to its cost), but there is also this broader social, cultural, and political enforcement of the taboo.
Now many would argue that this has contributed significantly to the civilized, centrist quality of German politics and public debate—and they have a point. I find that many young Germans support this approach wholeheartedly. And would the rest of the world have been happier if Germany did not have this taboo on any hint of a revival of the worst that modern humanity has produced?
Yet this whole approach comes with a price, and the electoral success of the AfD shows that the price is going up. Sieferle’s Finis Germania is a late, slight product of a sad, disordered, but undoubtedly fine mind. Simply to say “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, historically revisionist—therefore get thee behind me Satan and off the best-seller list you come” is a woefully inadequate response. Indeed, subjecting Sieferle to the taboo treatment actually supports his contention that this really is a taboo—that is, something put beyond the realm of rational debate.
For right-wing ideologues, such bans are wonderful free publicity, enabling them to pose as martyrs for free speech. Kubitschek, the publisher, gloated that the row at the Frankfurt book fair was “heathen fun.”
For the rank-and-file, it is yet more evidence that the liberal elites have so little time and respect for them that they “won’t look at us even with their asses.” Worse still: they won’t even let ordinary people say what they think. In a poll conducted in spring 2016 for the Freedom Index of the John Stuart Mill Institute in Heidelberg, only 57 percent of respondents said they felt that “one can freely express one’s political opinion in Germany today.”2
It’s therefore encouraging to see a growing number of German intellectuals advocating John Stuart Mill’s own response. Take on these arguments in free and open debate. Subject them to vigorous and rigorous scrutiny. Separate the wheat from the chaff. For as Mill famously argued, even a false argument can contain a sliver of truth, and the good sword of truth can only be kept sharp if constantly tested in open combat with falsehood. Otherwise the received opinion, even if it is correct, will only be held “in the manner of a prejudice.”
Sieferle’s two posthumously published texts, taken in the context of his life’s work, are eminently susceptible to the Mill treatment. While dismissing the hysterical, crypto-Nietzschean hyperbole of his last treatment of the “state religion” of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, we may yet take from it a useful challenge. More than seventy years after the end of World War II, how does one prevent German leaders’ statements about the Nazi past from being reduced to empty ritual? How does one truly bring home those horrors to a generation of Germans who have known nothing of the kind? If the first commandment is not Sieferle’s bitterly sarcastic “thou shalt have no other holocaust besides me,” then what is it? If the answer is, as I believe it should be, “thou shalt do everything thou canst to prevent any new crimes against humanity,” then what follows from that? It was on precisely these grounds that the then foreign minister Joschka Fischer eloquently made the case for German military participation in the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when faced with a possible Serbian genocide. And if you can’t prevent the crime against humanity, then don’t you at least have a special responsibility to take in some of its victims? Refugees from Syria in 2015, for example.
Engaging in the battle of ideas is, of course, only one part of the indispensable fight against the new right and xenophobic nationalist populism. A lot will depend on the overall performance of the expected new “Jamaica” coalition government—so-called for the colors of the four disparate parties (black for CDU and CSU, yellow for Free Democrats, and green for Green) that will each make one leg of this improbable pantomime horse. Any more terrorist attacks perpetrated by violent Islamists will stoke the angstabout immigration and Islam. Showing that immigration is now actually under control will be crucial. As important will be the success or failure of Germany’s attempts to integrate into schools, civic life, and the workplace the more than one million immigrants who have arrived in the last couple of years. Can they become what the scholars Herfried and Marina Münkler call “The New Germans”?3
The politics are such that the CSU certainly, and the CDU sooner or later, will move to the right on issues of immigration and identity, to try to win back the populist vote—as center-right leaders have done in neighboring Austria and the Netherlands. Even the centrist Merkel’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, wrote earlier this year in the mass circulation Bild-Zeitung that “we are not Burqa”—a ludicrous sentence that may be translated as “give us your votes rather than defecting to the Alternative.” But precisely if you are moving to the right, while at the same time trying to integrate all those mainly Muslim immigrants, it becomes all the more important to fight the battle of ideas and draw a bright line between positive civic patriotism and xenophobic, new-right nationalism.
Here is the cultural struggle for Germany’s future.
This figure comes from an opinion poll by the highly respected Allensbach Institute. It should be noted that the alternative offered was “Is it better to be cautious?”—to which 28 percent agreed, the rest answering “with reservations” or “undecided.” Quoted in Freiheitsindex Deutschland 2016 des John Stuart Mill Instituts für Freiheitsforschung, edited by Ulrike Ackermann (Frankfurt: Humanities Online, 2016). ↩
3
Herfried and Marina Münkler, Die neuen Deutschen: Ein Land vor seiner Zukunft (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2016). ↩
A Princeton PhD, was a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Central/Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. After leaving the State Department in 2003 to express strong reservations about the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, he shared ideas with Georgetown University students on the tension between propaganda and public diplomacy. He has given talks on "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" to participants in the "Open World" program. Among Brown’s many articles is his latest piece, “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War,” now online. He is the compiler (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the USSR: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (also online). In the past century, he served as an editor/translator of a joint U.S.-Soviet publication of archival materials, The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations,1765-1815. His approach to "scholarly" aspirations is poetically summarized by Goethe: "Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life."
