Work makes you free! Death is a master from Germany!
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death comes as a master from Germany
we drink you at nightfall and morning we drink you and drink you
a master from Germany death comes with eyes that are blue
with a bullet of lead he will hit in the mark he will hit you
a man in the house your golden hair Margarete
he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a grave
he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Paul Celan, Todesfuge
[...]Uwe Luthardt, who belonged to the regional NPD leadership in the eastern city of Jena* [...]"The aim is the restoration of the Reich in which a new SA takes revenge on anyone who disagrees with them," Luthardt said. SA refers to Sturmabteilung, the Nazi party's para-military brown shirts. Luthardt, who said he quit the party in disgust after just three months on its board, said the Nazi anthem was regularly sung at meetings and that the NPD often received donations from old Nazis in South America.
*I live in Jena, it's my city and my university gave us Hegel, Schopenhauer (doctorate "in absentia", 1813), Gottfried Benn, Kurt Tucholsky, Christa Wolf, Karl Marx (doctorate "in absentia", 1841), and "The university's reputation peaked under the auspices of duke Charles Augustus, Goethe's patron (1787–1806), when Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich von Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller were on its teaching staff." It is embarrassing because the university was suppressed by the aristocracy due to "the suspicions of the various German governments in regard to the democratic ideas coming out of Jena."
Well, now that the preliminaries are over, what's the point of the diary? I wanted to share with you all, some disturbing things that are going on here. Before the latest on the US economy, we had a lot of discussions about being surrounded by Glenn Beck and his ilk. We appropriately derided him with ridicule, but I think there may be a danger of falling into complacency in times of economic stress. So I wanted to share this.
Hitler Salutes, Nazi Songs and Dreams of a New Reich
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You recently quit the right extremist party NPD. Aren't you afraid?
Luthardt: The local party leader threatened me. He said a board member doesn't quit the party, he's either thrown out or disappears. I replied that I know more about him than he does about me. Since then it's been quiet. Someone who just quits usually gets a lot of problems, and can find himself waking up in intensive care.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So people who leave are threatened?
Luthardt: It happens. Otherwise the party would have even fewer members. The mood isn't good at the moment. It's easy to see that the party is short of money.
Yes, the mood isn't good at the moment because they are being hit with one financial scandal after another. On top of that, an investigation of a porn scandal involving a young woman NPD member in Berlin and the party's blackmail of threatening to show her personal sex videos on the internet if she left the party. It is also important, and hopeful, to note that without threats and assaults, they wouldn't have as many members.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What didn't you like about your fellow party members?
Luthardt: It wasn't really my world. When you went along to evening meetings, you saw all the shaven heads -- and a black sun or other Nazi symbols tattooed on arms. They usually just boozed or were abusive. If there's no opponent around, they just fight among themselves.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The grassroots aren't especially intellectual, in other words?
Luthardt: Many in the JN (Young National Socialists) and in the Kameradschaften (eds. note: loosely organized far-right groups) have an IQ close to my shoe size. Most of them are simply failures: failed pupils, people who dropped out of school or their apprenticeships, alcoholics that can't find a foothold anywhere else, thugs. But every local organization has three to five men who don't have criminal records. They're the ones sent to face the press or man information stands.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What did you hope to get from the party when you joined?
Luthardt: I wanted to do something for Germany, I wasn't interest in a Greater Germany. And suddenly everyone was saying we'll take back Silesia and then we'll give the communists a thrashing.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: How does the party finance itself?
Luthardt: Through music events among other things, they get money from ticket sales. And then of course through the Festival of Peoples, that generated just under €17,000 in 2007.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: But you have to subtract the money the bands get from that amount.
Luthardt: No. Usually one tells the authorities that the bands get paid. But in reality they just get their expenses back and a receipt for a supposedly paid fee. But that is donated back to the party. And the party can write the donation off their taxes.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why do the bands forego the money they are due?
Luthardt: Out of conviction. It happens in the party too. Whenever I went to Berlin on a training course, we got our transport costs paid but then handed the money back to the party in the form of donations. It's the same pattern.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: How are the donations laundered -- apart from the falsified receipts?
Luthardt: Take the donations from South America...
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Donations from South America?
Luthardt: Yes, payments from nationalist Germans who haven't been living in Germany for a while. They make donations to small companies, for example, which in turn redirect the money to the party. Voigt's (eds. note: NPD chairman Udo Voigt) power base partly consists of money men from South America -- and Jürgen Rieger (eds. note: Voigt's deputy) has excellent contacts there.
So, Nazi-Punk usually gets eyerolls in the US, but it is significant here. Young unemployed and uneducated men jumping into mosh pits, what else is new? Well, the difference is there is a strong ideology that goes along with it. The mosh pit dancers envision themselves as the new SA, and they beat the shit out of foreigners and throw rocks through the windows of pizzerias. Shadows of 1931? German financiers from South America? There was a time when we believed that The Boys from Brazil was just fiction.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the media, NPD officials portray themselves as right-wing democrats and try to avoid unconstitutional statements. How radical is the party really?
Luthardt: The aim is the restoration of the Reich in which a new SA (eds. note: the paramilitary arm of the Nazi party) takes revenge on anyone who disagrees with them.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does that also apply to the moderate wing?
Luthardt: There is no moderate wing. The few isolated moderates there are have no say. The media training courses at party headquarters are very effective. The members know how they must sell themselves. It starts with the instruction that any meeting with outsiders must be held in innocuous offices. That applies to everyone apart from the chairman. He deliberately poses behind a massive desk with party flags in the party headquarters. The Jena party headquarters deserves its name "Brown House." No journalist has ever been in there.
I have no idea where the "Braunhaus" is here. But notice, as I've commented before, that they are now Nationalist Democrats - the socialism part is out of vogue, but if it walks like a duck....
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What would they see?
Luthardt: A load of SS pictures in the cellar. And there's a room with weapons.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the claim that the NPD isn't interested in the "Third Reich" is just for self-protection.
Luthardt: It's pure tactics. The idea is to atttract those who haven't yet understood that the party isn't right-wing radical, it's much more radical than that. It's about showing a respectable image in public. That's why the party leadership prefers members who have totally normal haircuts and clothes. They can be sent to man the information stands.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the claim that the NPD isn't interested in the "Third Reich" is just for self-protection.
Luthardt: It's pure tactics. The idea is to atttract those who haven't yet understood that the party isn't right-wing radical, it's much more radical than that. It's about showing a respectable image in public. That's why the party leadership prefers members who have totally normal haircuts and clothes. They can be sent to man the information stands.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Isn't there a danger that the neo-Nazi activists will be put off if the party presents too harmless an image?
Luthardt: No, because everyone knows it's just tactics. The leaflets, the placards, the opposition to Hartz IV (eds. note: unpopular low unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed) -- there's no substance behind that. No one knows what alternative there could be to Hartz IV.
Let's kick out all the foreigners, then the Germans will have jobs again, that's the basic concept the NPD talks about. They only refer to freight trains when no one from outside is listening.
Does this sound familiar, Mr. Dobbs?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The freight trains of the Third Reich?
Luthardt: The ones in which they want to put political opponents, the Jews and the foreigners once they've taken over the country again. Internally there's very plain speaking. And the singing of the Horst Wessel song (eds. note: the anthem of the Nazi party) is also very popular. No wonder that the Kameradschaften groups are willing to bite their tongues in public.
Wow, imagine that, I mean think about it. This is not nut-case hyperbole, this is actual discussion of freight trains.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: But relations with the Kameradschaften aren't always easy.
Luthardt: Absolutely not. The Free Nationalists don't like to be dictated to and are skeptical about parties. But most of them still let themselves be used by the NPD. They're the useful idiots of the party, comparable to the role the SA had for the Nazis. I always tell them: just look at the history of the SA, that's just what will happen to you when they're in power.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: When did you notice that the internal communications of the party are so different from the way it shows itself to the outside world?
Luthardt: Very soon after I joined the board. It's not hard if you see how people greet each other with their arm outstretched.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What kind of politics do these gentlemen dream of?
Luthardt: Of the German Reich. They're totally convinced that they'll win an election one day and that things will really get going. Everyone can imagine what would happen then.
So here we are. Here, at least, Godwin is out the window. We have the real thing. Not wanna-be ex cons in an "Aryan Brotherhood" or dipshit wannabees in full fascist uniform jumping in the river to dodge Jake and Elwood in their killer car.
As you can see, we have a real threat. These are not just "neo-Nazis" to be brushed aside as a bunch of kooks, these people are the real thing. A mass of ignorant "SA" types to do the job until the "respectable" lawyer types form the SS and recreate the Night of Long Knives. That is their fantasy as per the interview. It would be so absurd as to ignore if it weren't for the fact that they are making headway in regional parliaments (think roughly of US state legislatures).
Luckily, the party is in self-destruct mode over the scandals. But that will not eliminate the sentiment that thrived in the party in the first place.
So, the question here on Kos is, do right wing groups espouse the same rhetoric in the US? If so, do they also use the same tactics? Would Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs fit in with the description of the "useful idiots"? What about Limbaugh and Malkin?
I think what I wanted to do here is point out that we have REAL Nazis, even in my own city. I mean the real thing, not just right wing orgasmic fantasies, but a real movement.
Is there a resemblance in the US of the real thing over here and the right's movement over there. Does Godwin still apply.
Or do we forget the words of Paul Celan...?
About the Author: ME, Jeff Dem
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Jeff Dem