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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2005Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Auschwitz shadows Bush, Europe
George Bush’s February trip to Europe was full of
diplomatic niceties, but did little to stem the inter-capitalist divide between
the U.S. and Europe. In Germany, as Bush’s motorcade rode through the silent
streets of Mainz, cleared for "security" reasons, 15,000 anti-war
demonstrators gathered in the distance. A town meeting had to be cancelled after
the German government denied a U.S. request to screen out "hostile"
participants as undemocratic. Recent polls showed that even Russia’s
authoritarian Vladimir Putin is viewed more favorably than Bush! He had to
travel 400 miles further east, to tiny formerly Communist Slovakia, before he
could find a sympathetic crowd. Nonetheless, at least at the inter-capitalist level,
Bush was on stronger ground than last year. He has been re-elected to head the
sole remaining superpower. The Iraq elections went far more smoothly than
anticipated. And the weak U.S. economy is still much stronger than those of its
European counterparts. In 2004, unemployment across the European Union (EU)
averaged 8.9% (vs. 5.4% in the U.S.), with the economic growth rate a mere 2.2%
(vs. 4.3% in the U.S.). This underlies German Prime Minister Gerhard
Schroeder’s drive to roll back Germany’s welfare state. With German unemployment at its highest level since
1945, it is doubtful that Schroeder’s beleaguered social democratic government
will give up its most important source of popularity, opposition over Iraq, and
over U.S. unilateralism more generally. (Even Putin has signed the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming, allowing this international treaty to go into
effect.) The diplomatic smiles between Bush and France’s
Jacques Chirac may have had slightly more substance. They are largely in accord
over Lebanon. Moreover, just as Bush has always felt an affinity to Putin’s
brutal war in Chechnya, he surely sympathizes with Chirac’s efforts to end one
of the most significant gains for labor of the 1990s, the 35-hour week. Despite
demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of workers on Jan. 20 and Feb. 5, Chirac
has already pushed this retrogressive change through the lower house of
parliament. All of this is occurring in the context of the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Jan. 27, 1945, at a
time when Europe has seen a rise in anti-Semitic and racist incidents. Because
Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops (in the U.S. at the time, Soviet
newsreels of the emaciated survivors were dismissed for months as Communist
propaganda), the anniversary received little attention in the U.S., which was
not among the 50 countries whose heads of state attended the on-site
commemorations, alongside 1,000 very elderly survivors. In 2005, in that place
of horror where Nazis murdered 1.5 million people, two-thirds of them Jews,
there were many stirring speeches. Ukraine’s Viktor Yuschenko, whose father survived
Auschwitz as a Red Army prisoner, vowed that "anti-Semitism and
xenophobia" would "never again" be allowed to dominate his
country. Putin condemned Nazi brutality, but did not specifically mention Jews,
here following the old Stalinist line. (In Russia itself, reactionaries and
Stalinists introduced legislation that would have banned many Jewish
organizations, something Putin’s forces quickly quashed.) Poland’s Alexander Kwasniewski saluted all who fought against the Nazis, including the Russians, and singled out "the horrific fate of the Jews." Nonetheless, Polish politicians attempted to bloc European Parliament language mentioning that Auschwitz was "in Poland." They wish to celebrate Poland’s massive and heroic resistance without acknowledging those who collaborated, let alone the contradictions of the resistance itself. Such problems are not limited to Eastern Europe. In February, the anniversary of the destruction of Dresden by allied bombs was marred by a demonstration by 5,000 neo-Nazis, who were answered by thousands more carrying white roses, a reference to the anti-Nazi student movement of that name. |
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