Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [105]
In a sense, the German neo-fascists are a counterreaction to reunification that filled the void when the primary anti-Communist revolution failed. Had the indigenous political movements that helped bring down first the iron curtain and then the Berlin Wall survived the traumatic passage to German reunification and been even a little successful in the West-dominated elections that came soon afterwards, Ossi extremism might have been averted. But the citizens’ movement that constituted itself as Neues Forum (New Forum) and the intellectuals and workers who had sought a “third way,” some version of civil society between state-coercive communism and private market capitalism, drown in what we might call liberty’s second wave.25 Privatization quickly displaced democratization on the German agenda, which for East Germans meant that the price they had to pay for individual liberty was a total loss of regional autonomy. After four years of this experience, it is not so surprising that many East Germans, disgusted by the West and fearful of the Rightists in their midst, have realigned themselves with a revamped Communist Party that has itself become a voice against McWorld. With civil society’s third way out of the question, and the second (capitalist) way so disappointing, they are renegotiating the first (communist) way. In the June 1994 German local elections (as in Hungary, Latvia, and a number of other nations) Communists running on the renamed Democratic Socialist Party ticket emerged as the most powerful entity in a number of localities and won the mayoralty campaign in the Saxon town of Hoyerswerda (which had experienced skinhead violence against foreigners earlier in the year).26
Where the old Left is regrouping around opposition to the vices of capitalism, the new Right, resentment transformed into pathology, is waging an antiforeign, antimaterialist Kulturkampf. Today, most neo-Nazis and skinheads seem well beyond the ministrations of either McWorld or the democratic socialist opposition to it. To those who are East Germans, impoverished and increasingly nostalgic, with unemployment at 16 percent or worse (over double the national norm, and far worse still among the young), it is easy to regard West Germans as an “other”—aggressive agents of McWorld and traitors to the real Germany (rather like the Jews were made out to be in the 1920s). Up to 25 percent of East Germans under twenty-five are thought to harbor right-wing sentiments. And for those unwilling to revile their West German cousins, Germany’s labor minions (foreign workers from Turkey and points east and south) give to “otherness” a distinctively alien character—different habits and mores, a foreign accent, darker skin tones—as well as a corporal embodiment that invites violent retribution.27 Poverty roughens the already jagged edges of alienation. We can again turn to the Right’s rancorous rock lyrics (cited above) to hear the economic side of the story:
Times are tough for the German people
Foreign troops still occupy our land
Forty years of calamity and corruption …
The hostile warriors are blackshirt Greens—“lust for profits poisons our environment,” they groan—and though their own taste is teen tawdry and calculated more to shock their peers than to embrace their forebears (no traditional lederhosen shorts or student fraternity caps here!), they know McDonald’s is “a dump” and resent the incursions of global culture that to them are perhaps most paradoxically evident in their own inability to resist them.
The real foreigners (as against the symbolic foreigners: rich West Germans, Yanks, the merchants of McWorld) are another matter. “Foreigners Out!” is an easier slogan to sell than