Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [197]
22. The band Final Stage’s “Winter in the F.R.G.” asks “Will there ever be a Germany again worth living in?” (see above). Schoenhuber eschews such neo-Nazi crudities in favor of such polite one-liners as: “Me, I love the Turks, but it is when they are in Turkey I love them the most.” Rather than celebrate Hitler, he speaks of the great fascist party that Hitler “betrayed.” Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, “Franz Schoenhuber: un SS trés frequentable,” Le Nouvel Observateur/Monde, April 16–22, 1992, p. 66 my translation.
23. Between July 1991 and July 1992, East German manufacturing jobs were almost halved (45.6 percent) as compared with a reduction of 2.5 percent in comparable jobs in West Germany. The Week in Germany, September 25, 1992. In 1991, Treuhandanstalt (the West German privatization agency) facilitated the sale of ten East German newspapers to West German publishers. The Week in Germany, April 19, 1991.
24. Ignatieff notes the tendency of German skinheads to borrow from the British, though he indulges in both exaggeration and a certain Canadian animus against England in quipping that: “Skin culture may just be Britain’s most enduring contribution to Germany and the new Europe.” Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, p. 83. For Nazis on-line, see Jon Wiener, “Free Speech on the Internet,” The Nation, June 13, 1994, pp. 825–828.
25. For an account from a critical perspective, see Norman Birnbaum’s two-part essay, “How New the New Germany?” Part I, Salmagundi, Nos. 88–89, Fall 1990/Winter 1991, pp. 234–263; Part II, Salmagundi, Nos. 90–91, Spring/Summer 1991, pp. 131–178, 292–296. Also, Peter Rossman, “Dashed Hopes for a New Socialism,” The Nation, May 7, 1990, pp. 632–635.
26. These victories occurred despite a united opposition joined by all other parties. The Democratic Socialists have a faction called “Communist Platform,” which remains Marxist-Leninist, but for the most part the party depends on East German local loyalty, the politics of personality, and a party philosophy that states: “Our goal is not the revolutionary overthrow of the democratic parliamentary order and the building of some kind of dictatorship, but rather the true democratization of Germany.” The party leader, Gregor Gysi, plays directly on East German resentments: “I accept the political freedom, the legal order and the democratic possibilities that this system offers. But I also maintain that people in eastern Germany have lost important rights, and that in this society there is much social injustice and much that needs to be fundamentally changed. We are not facing the global, social, ecological and cultural challenges that confront us. So for me there are still very good reasons to be anti-capitalist.” Stephen Kinzer, “In Germany, Communists Resurgent,” The New York Times, June 29, 1994, p. A 6.
27. Next to workers from Greece, Italy, Turkey, and North Africa, are newer immigrants from Vietnam and India along with a burgeoning crowd of political refugees from Eastern Europe who make good use of Germany’s liberal asylum laws.
28. Frankfurt, for example, is nearly a third foreign, and has over 140 nationalities, making it a rival of Los Angeles and New York as a center of multiculturalism. Germany’s other irony is that, like Israel, it has enacted a legal right of return for all ethnic Germans. Thus, in addition to the millions of East Germans, it has dealt with 100,000 ethnic Germans from the East. To West Germans, many of these returnees, and poor East Germans as well, are seen as “foreigners.” Naturally, the returnees resent the “real” Turkish and Greek “foreigners” just as much as they themselves are resented by the West Germans. Ignatieff tells the revealingly ironic story of the newly arrived ethnic German immigrant