The 1990s Were Worse Than You Remember

The Republican right has always contained a subcurrent hostile to multiracial democracy. In When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz argues that this reactionary force flourished in the 1990s and is behind the emergence of Donald Trump’s right-wing populism.

Pat Buchanan celebrating a strong second-place showing to then president George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, February 18, 1992.

 (Steve Liss / Getty Images)

BYPAUL M. RENFRO

JACOBIN
07.24.2024

Review of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

In mid-January 1992 — as the USSR lay in ruins and Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to the incumbent president George H. W. Bush was gaining steam — the economist and Cato Institute cofounder Murray Rothbard addressed the second annual meeting of the paleoconservative John Randolph Club. In his remarks, Rothbard touted the growing alliance between the libertarian and paleo movements and underscored the need for a robust “right-wing populism” to destroy the “soft Marxism” of American liberalism.

“With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us,” Rothbard exclaimed as he barreled toward the end of his speech, “we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal.”

This “furious coda” to Rothbard’s address inspired the title of John Ganz’s important and engaging new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Through a nuanced exploration of the chaotic and contentious political landscape of the early ’90s, Ganz provides something of a prehistory of Trumpism — or a “prehistory of the American fascist movement,” as Ganz described it in a recent interview with the Baffler.

Ganz covers a lot of territory here — from a brief yet productive engagement with the theories of Antonio Gramsci to careful and compelling analyses of the POW/MIA movement (a “nationalist cult of the undead,” Ganz calls it), the late-twentieth-century politics of divorce, the pervasive anti-Asian racism of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the racial tensions that marked early 1990s New York City.

The result is a smart, insightful, and original look at US political culture in an era of perpetual crisis and uncertainty, one that never loses sight of the material and structural conditions that help fuel antidemocratic movements.
Con Men, Kooks, and Conspiracists

It came from the swamp. Ganz’s narrative opens with David Duke, former grand wizard of the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and, it goes without saying, a virulent racist and antisemite. In 1989, Duke ran a shockingly successful campaign for the Louisiana House of Representatives before suffering a pair of very public defeats in races for the US Senate (1990) and the Louisiana governorship (1991). Yet despite Duke’s losses in the latter two contests, Ganz argues, his broad appeal among whites in Louisiana (especially the state’s northern parishes) and beyond reflected not just deeply entrenched antiblack racism and antisemitism, but also growing disillusionment with government and the diminishing fortunes of the white middle class in America.


Though Ronald Reagan had ostensibly returned the United States to glory after the “malaise” of the 1970s, his policy program of “deregulation, tax cuts, high interest rates, and scaled-back social services” — not to mention hostility to labor unions amid widespread deindustrialization and offshoring — represented a form of “open class war waged on behalf of the rich,” Ganz writes. The rich won the war. While “the income of the top 1 percent grew by almost 75 percent” during the gilded ’80s, “the average income for 80 percent of American families declined,” Ganz explains. The poverty rate — especially for women, children, and people of color — spiked, just as the burgeoning carceral state increasingly served to discipline and warehouse the poor and the dispossessed.Though many liberals may remember the Clinton years fondly — what with their (unequally shared) economic prosperity and ubiquitous anti-politics — Ganz implies that the 1992 election laid the foundation for the dysfunction and rancor that characterize the US political system today.

Against this backdrop of staggering inequality and selective austerity, con men, kooks, and conspiracists had a field day. Figures such as David Duke — and marginally less racist ones like Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell — connected with a disenchanted public through talk radio, daytime talk shows, cable TV, and other less traditional media. Less-heralded characters like Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard generally liked what they saw. For them, Duke, Buchanan, and other firebrands represented the vanguard of a movement to undo the liberal order forged through the New Deal and the Cold War. Francis, for his part, endorsed a “new nationalism” to dismantle both the “managerial” regime — a forerunner of sorts to the “PMC” — and the “globalism” that flowed from Francis Fukuyama’s supposed “end of history.” In Rothbard’s words, this incipient movement sought to “repeal the twentieth century.”

All the while, as Ganz shows, more conventional, “establishment” figures struggled to meet the moment — particularly within the context of the 1992 presidential campaign. Much to the chagrin of George H. W. Bush — who expected greater adulation for helping to navigate the Cold War’s end and spawn a “new world order” — the news media and the voting public generally (and perhaps fairly) viewed the patrician as out of touch.

When President Bush visited the bedside of a firefighter injured in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, for instance, he made a peculiar reference to his Kennebunkport, Maine, vacation home, on which the first lady was overseeing repairs following a storm. “In the midst of the smoldering, gutted frames of Los Angeles,” writes Ganz, “the reference to those pesky repairs on the family compound in a genteel corner of the Northeast reached a height of bad taste only the well-born can hope to attain.”

Buchanan’s primary challenge highlighted the lack of enthusiasm for Bush among the Republican Party’s conservative base, and the flagging economy only made matters worse for the incumbent president. As the 1992 campaign reached its crescendo in the fall, Bush “had some of the worst approval ratings since late-stage Richard Nixon and Harry Truman,” Ganz notes.

On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton often found himself betwixt and between. He hoped to distinguish himself from the seemingly passé liberalism of the Great Society and demonstrate his racist bona fides without alienating core Democratic constituencies — namely union and African American voters. And even though Clinton prevailed in the 1992 contest, it wasn’t the most convincing victory, especially given Bush’s remarkable unpopularity. Despite an Electoral College landslide, Clinton secured just 43 percent of the popular vote compared to Bush’s 37.5, while the insurgent Texan Ross Perot finished with nearly 19 percent, the best showing for a third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Though many liberals may remember the Clinton years fondly — what with their (unequally shared) economic prosperity and ubiquitous anti-politics — Ganz implies that the 1992 election laid the foundation for the dysfunction and rancor that characterize the US political system today.
How We Got Here

When the Clock Broke doesn’t necessarily prove that the United States “cracked up” in the first few years of the 1990s — or that the characters and themes at the heart of American politics in this period somehow set the stage for Donald Trump’s presidential run in 2015–16. The book ends a week after the 1992 election with Trump in a limousine on his way to Atlantic City. But the link between that moment and our own isn’t drawn as clearly as it could’ve been.

Of course, the resonances between the early 1990s and the early-to-mid-2020s are undeniable. Yet without the collective trauma of September 11, 2001, or the decades-long adventurism that followed, without the global economic meltdown of 2007–8, and without the election and reelection of an African American president, would Trump have pulled off the unthinkable in 2016?

Probably not, and Ganz would likely admit as much. So how exactly did we get from 1992 to 2016 to 2024? When the Clock Broke doesn’t provide a clear answer, and maybe it’s not supposed to. But it will force readers to think more deeply about the historical circumstances and material conditions that authored our present interlocking crises.

“Identifying the thinkers who helped transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump may be an intellectual parlor game,” Ganz writes. But as he illustrates, it can be a worthwhile exercise.

CONTRIBUTORS
Paul M. Renfro is an associate professor of history at Florida State University and the author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America and Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State.

The Global Stakes of Kenya’s Protests

Protests in Kenya that began last month over higher taxes continue to rock the country. They have exposed the fissures running through its facade of stability, from its massive debts to the role it plays in upholding Western imperialism in the region.

Kenyan police officers intervene in people protesting against the tax hikes in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 25, 2024. (Gerald Anderson / Anadolu via Getty Images)

BYSAMAR AL-BULUSHI

JACOBIN
07.24.2024

In mid-June, tens of thousands of predominately young people took to the streets across Kenya. The focus of what commentators have dubbed the Gen Z–led revolt — which has now entered its sixth week and spanned at least twenty-three of Kenya’s forty-seven counties including the capital Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru, and Mombasa — was a controversial finance bill that would have raised taxes on a range of basic goods, exacerbating an already existing cost-of-living crisis in the country.


As part of the largest-scale direct challenge to the Kenyan state in decades, protesters stormed Parliament, triggering a brutal police crackdown that has left over fifty dead and hundreds injured. President William Ruto was forced to withdraw the controversial bill, originally introduced in response to pressure by the International Monetary Fund to raise two hundred billion Kenya shillings ($1.55 billion) for debt servicing. According to Ruto, sixty-on out of every hundred shillings paid in taxes goes toward outstanding bills.

Just last year, Kenyans took to the streets en masse in response to the skyrocketing costs of food and fuel. During former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s term in office (2013–2022), public debt had more than quadrupled. It now stands at 68 percent of GDP. The introduction of taxes on basic goods — originally pitched to the population as a means to fund schools, hospitals, and other public services — was in reality needed to repay debtors.

While the costs of Kenya’s debts have increased along with global interests rates, the pressure on poor Kenyans, who spend 60 percent of their income on food products that have doubled in cost over the past two years, has only worsened. Although Kenya’s economy has grown significantly faster than its neighbors, both in gross and per capita terms, throughout this century, pressure to service debts has forced it to cut public spending, which has exacerbated inequality.

Prominent opposition figure Raila Odinga championed last year’s protests, calculating (as he has done repeatedly in the past) that he stood to gain by adding his voice to popular grievances about basic everyday needs. This year was different for two reasons: First, Odinga now needs Ruto to support his bid for the chairmanship of the African Union and second, the protesters have explicitly rejected a politics of dissent traditionally organized around tribe — one of Odinga’s hallmarks — and political parties. Instead, protesters have embraced a bottom-up, decentralized approach that is “leaderless, tribeless, and fearless.” Disillusioned by the ruling class altogether, they aim to bypass elite insider deal-making and to reimagine politics anew.

This shift represents a substantial threat to the ruling elite who have historically framed political and economic grievances in the language of tribe rather than class, with the goal of divide and rule. In stark contrast to a politics long dominated by division and hierarchy, the youth espouse a spirit of solidarity and mutual care: as the Kenyan journalist Patrick Gathara has observed, “The movement has been able to rely on volunteers organizing themselves to provide support for the protests, whether it is food, medical attention, blood banks, legal representation, or raising money to support families of victims and to pay medical bills, without having a central leadership that can be targeted or compromised.”


While Ruto showed some signs of responsiveness to the protesters’ demands — withdrawing the bill, firing nearly his entire cabinet, (only to then reappoint six of them) and calling for national dialogue — his administration deployed the Kenya Defence Forces in armored military vehicles to patrol the streets and sought to ban protests across Nairobi. Writing in the Kenyan magazine the Elephant, Maryanne Nduati anticipates that the hubris of Ruto and his Kenya Kwanza political party will ensure “a continuation and entrenchment of a top-down, tribal management style, patriarchal in attitude, self-centred in intent and destructive in effect.”

Indeed, the man who once appealed to the Kenyan youth on the basis of his humble origins, and who campaigned for the presidency as a self-proclaimed champion of Kenya’s “hustler” nation, now speaks condescendingly of the same young people’s purported ignorance and inexperience. Ruto talks simultaneously of “criminal elements” having infiltrated the protests to spark chaos and of foreign meddlers (specifically the Ford Foundation). In short, Ruto is desperate to deflect responsibility, to distract from the core issues, and to discredit those who are risking their lives in the push for what the Malawian scholar Thandika Mkandawire would call substantive democracy, which attends to questions of equality and material well-being, and requires the active participation of citizens in a system of deliberative governance.
Geopolitical Stakes

Thus far, the bulk of critical analysis has focused on what recent developments mean for Ruto’s ability to remain in office. Even if he were to be successfully pushed out, the pressures imposed on Kenya by its debtors are real and would not go away under new leadership. Furthermore, the stakes of these protests extend far beyond the boundaries of Kenya, and of Africa more broadly.

Kenya currently hosts the largest US embassy in Africa and is among the top recipients of US security assistance on the continent: between 2010 and 2020, the US Department of Defense provided $400 million in counterterrorism “train and equip” support, enabling it to vastly expand its security infrastructure. The US military operates from several bases in the country, including the naval base in Manda Bay, which has served as a launch pad for drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kenya in September 2023, where he signed a five-year joint defense cooperation agreement with the Kenyan government focused primarily on the ongoing fight against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab.

There is perhaps no better indication of Kenya’s growing geopolitical significance than the recent state visit by President Ruto to the White House in late May of this year, where President Joe Biden announced that the country had been designated a major non-NATO ally. At the time of the visit, most analysts attributed this designation to Kenya’s willingness to lead a US-backed police intervention in Haiti. Few highlighted the equally relevant decision by the Kenyan government to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, a US-led multinational coalition designed to protect the flow of global trade in the Red Sea amidst the blockade led by Yemen’s de facto Houthi government. The fact that other states in the region —including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Djibouti — have all refused to join this coalition makes Kenya’s participation all the more significant.

Kenya’s growing relevance to the United States and NATO means that these powers cannot risk an uncertain political situation within Kenya itself. This is, perhaps, the one source of leverage the African nation, which has for a long time been seen as a paragon of stability in the region, has over its creditors. It is worth noting that while US officials have condemned the police violence against protesters in Kenya, they have strategically avoided going as far as to call the country a “failed state.”

But US officials have long been aware of the sordid history of police repression and human rights abuse in Kenya — including at the hands of US-trained police units, and this has not deterred them from deepening their security partnership with the Kenyan government. In fact, the Biden administration announced during President Ruto’s trip to Washington that it would be providing $7 million in new aid to the east African nation’s police force.
The Road Ahead

While Kenya is in theory a civilian-led democratic state, blurred boundaries between civilian and military power have been the norm throughout its post-independence history, a carryover from the colonial era. Its participation in the so-called “war on terror” has further eroded clear distinctions between these two realms, as Kenyan security forces have been trained and equipped for counterinsurgent warfare. If the recent disappearances, abductions, and extra-judicial killing of protesters is any indication, we can expect to see an expansion of Kenya’s war on “terror” to encompass the dissenting public as a whole.

With help from Washington, DC–based public relations firms, the Kenyan state has become adept at shielding itself from international scrutiny, presenting itself as a stable democracy and reliable partner that stands apart from the “typical” African country plagued by violence and instability. This investment (spanning over the past decade plus) seems to have paid off, and likely explains why the US mainstream media has barely covered the protests. It was in the aftermath of Kenya’s last major political crisis — the post-election violence of 2007–2008 which resulted in eleven hundred dead and over half a million people displaced — that the Kenyan government established Brand Kenya and hired US lobby firms for damage control.

Given the roles that Kenya is now playing in Somalia, Haiti, and the Red Sea, the US political establishment will likely be more than willing to work alongside Ruto in the effort to quell the protests and to maintain an image of the country as peaceful and stable. In the midst of US anxieties about competition from China and Russia, the souring of US-Ethiopia relations, and the recent loss of Niger as a security partner in the Sahel, the United States will be all the more desperate to protect its existing partnerships on the continent.

Alongside questions of debt cancellation and food, financial, and renewable energy sovereignty, these are the broader dynamics that are likely to shape the situation on the ground. The challenges facing Kenya’s new generation of protesters are therefore multidimensional, encompassing both internal and external forces. One thing, however, is clear: Kenyan youth have sparked a new spirit of revolt across the continent, and they are giving substantive meaning to otherwise bankrupt rhetoric about “democracy.” As long as the conditions giving rise to inequality persist, so too will the uprisings.

CONTRIBUTOR

Samar Al-Bulushi is on the faculty at UC Irvine and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Estuaries and Coastlines Capture Most Plastic, Giving Us a Chance to Stop Ocean Pollution

By Melissa Bowen, Gaoyang Li , Giovanni Coco , Zheng Chen

 July 23, 2024

Source: The Conversation

Image by Muntaka Chasant, Creative Commons 4.0

If you ask someone where plastic ends up, they will usually say the ocean. It’s not a surprising answer because we have known since the 1970s that plastic is accumulating in the subtropical oceans, far from land.

Most people have heard of the “great garbage patch”, a region of the North Pacific between Hawaii and California, where plastic is accumulating. Images of remote plastic-covered beaches often appear in the media.

However, the numbers don’t add up. Estimates of all the plastic drifting in the ocean show less than 10% of what enters rivers and coastlines reaches the subtropical accumulation zones.

Most must be ending up elsewhere, and the most likely places are along coastlines – either in estuaries, where rivers meet the sea, or along the open coast, where waves can push floating debris ashore.

We set out to investigate just how much plastic is retained in an estuary. The results of our research astonished us.

Using the main harbour of Auckland, the Waitematā estuary, as our study site, we made floating plastic packets using GPS receivers inside mobile phone pouches and tracked where they went over several tidal cycles.

Most ended up on the shoreline and none were able to move the relatively short distance needed to exit the estuary.

Tracks of buoyant plastics as they drift during spring tides in the Waitematā estuary from starting points where fresher water enters. The connection between the estuary and the ocean is at the far right. The colours show their speed in metres per second. Zheng Chen

The speed of the drifters varied between tides, as shown in the animations above (spring tide) and below (neap tide).

The tracks of buoyant plastics drifting during neap tides in the Waitematā estuary, with speed (in metres per second) shown by the colours. Zheng Chen

Currents in estuaries trap plastic

When we repeated the experiment with computer simulations, trying a wide range of freshwater flows and tides, we found the same thing. Anywhere from 60% to 90% of buoyant material was retained in the estuary over ten tidal cycles.

Surprisingly, when we increased the river flow in the model, the percentage of plastic retained in the estuary was very similar. Although the buoyant material moved towards the ocean, it became trapped before it reached the mouth.

Currents within the estuary trapped the buoyant material by “pumping” it towards land when the tide was coming in and pushing it towards the sides when the tide was going out, leading to more plastic grounded along the shore.

This movement on the incoming tide leads to the long lines of foam and debris you often see along the channel of an estuary, sometimes extending over many kilometres. On the outgoing tides, floating debris is pushed towards the sides of the channel where it accumulates.

We know these types of flows are happening in many estuaries around the world. Studies measuring plastic waste in estuaries in France, Germany and Vietnam also suggest much of plastic entering estuaries is being retained.

These findings show that removing plastic waste from the shorelines of our estuaries and coasts (and the rivers and creeks that flow into them) is a very effective way to prevent it from entering the ocean.

The most recent international study found the numbers do agree if one takes into account that plastic waste is trapped and retained along coasts.

Changing perspectives about plastic

This shift in the way we think about where plastic ends up has many implications.

For most places in the world, much of the plastic waste emitted locally stays close by. Collecting this plastic waste will keep most of it out of the ocean, which means local community clean-ups can make a difference in controlling marine pollution.

It also means, given the long lifetime of plastic, that shorelines have been accumulating this waste for many decades and are acting as plastic “reservoirs”. Much of the plastic pollution may be hidden from view as it degrades to micro- and nanometre-sized particles.

Efforts are underway in communities and within nations to reduce the use of plastic and remove it from the environment. An international treaty to mitigate plastic pollution is expected to be in place by the end of 2024.

The aim of the treaty will be to curb the emission of 53 million metric tonnes per year of new plastics  that would otherwise enter the aquatic environment by 2030. But we will need to continue cleaning up plastic for many decades to undo the legacy of our consumption.

The Long Shadow of German Colonialism

By Henning Melber

July 22, 2024

Source: African Arguments


The German empire and its colonies, 1914. Credit: Wikipedia

Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the European race for colonies and the scramble for Africa. But catching up, land grab between 1884 and 1900 elevated the German empire in the league of colonial empires at the time. Southwest Africa, Cameroon and Togo were in 1884 euphemistically proclaimed possessions under German protection, followed by East Africa in 1886, and a wide range of South Sea islands by the end of the 19th century. The lease of the Chinese Bay of Jiaozhou/Kiautschou was added to the “collection” in 1899.

“Deutschland über alles”

German involvement in the Chinese Boxer War at the turn of the century disclosed the dominant mindset and signalled Germany’s ambition to play a leading role among the imperial powers. It was conducted with uninhibited brutality, and found its expression in the infamous and racist Hunnenrede (Hun speech) by Emperor Wilhelm II when addressing soldiers despatched to China on 27 July 1900 at Bremerhaven:

“Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. … may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”

This set the tune for numerous subsequent “punitive expeditions” against indigenous people who resisted German “protection”. As figures suggest, during the whole colonial period of 30 years from 1884 to the start of World War 1 in 1914, the number of Germans in the colonies at any given time remained – even at the peak periods when soldiers were deployed – less than 50,000. But far more than a million colonised people paid with their lives in the direct forms of warfare conducted in the territories. Corporal punishment and executions, sexual abuse and forced labour were the order of the day. The Nilpferdpeitsche (hippopotamus whip) was widely associated with German rule in the West African territories.

A scorched earth policy in East Africa and genocide in Southwest Africa were just the tip of the iceberg of a “civilising mission”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, referred in his writings to the case of Southwest Africa as an early example. Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that German colonialism and an anthropology obsessed with Aryan superiority “from Darwin to Hitler” were the cradle of a mindset, culminating a few decades later in the Holocaust.

With World War 1 the German colonial empire collapsed. The Treaty of Versailles allocated the territories as mandates to the Allied states in 1919, thereby partly redistributing the colonial cake. The African colonies were transferred to the British crown (which delegated Southwest Africa to South Africa), France, and Belgium, with a tiny part of East Africa also going to Portugal. The Pacific islands were distributed to Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Perceived as humiliation, this did not bring an end to German colonial ambitions, but rather reinforced the desire and demands for empire. Colonial propaganda flourished during the Weimar Republic. It took new turns during the Nazi regime, when the slogan “Heim ins Reich” (back home to the empire) shifted from the demand to return the colonies towards eying Lebensraum (living space) increasingly in Eastern Europe.

Fighting colonial amnesia

While the foregoing underlines the lasting impact of the colonial era, many in Germany still tend to downplay the thirty years of overseas empire as a negligible historical episode, bordering on the harmless. For more than a century since the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884/85, marking Germany’s entry into the club of colonising states, this era largely remained a matter of colonial-apologetic romanticism, if not “forgotten”. More recently, the legacies of German colonial rule – not least for Germany itself – have become a matter of growing interest. In December 2021, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the Liberal Party (FDP) formed the government. Its coalition agreement declared, under the heading “Colonial Legacy”, the intent to reappraise German colonial history with special reference to the restitution of objects from colonial contexts. It also promised to develop a concept for a place for learning about and remembering colonialism. The coalition wanted to put an end to existing continuities with the colonial past and to initiate independent academic studies reappraising colonialism.

And yet, as my monograph The Long Shadow of German Colonialism documents, such solid, competent, and independent scholarly work reappraising German colonialism already exists, almost in abundance. Literature on manifold aspects of German colonialism has flourished since the late 1990s in both English and German by scholars from a variety of disciplines. One therefore wonders if this declared intention is a sign of ignorance or simply reflects the blindness of official policy and policymakers, thereby confirming the absence of any awareness of what is already known of this past, what David Andress diagnosed for the UK, France, and the US as Cultural Dementia:

“…the layering of mythology around history is not something that can be simply and uncontroversially pulled back by the application of expertise. The West’s current relationship to the past is … an actively constructed, jealously guarded toxic refusal to engage with facts that are well-known but emotionally and politically inconvenient.”

Such “loss of memory” has been at the heart of national identity formation since the birth of the so-called nation-state. As Ernest Renan already observed in a lecture at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882:

“Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation.”

But while dementia seems irreversible, colonial amnesia is not. Continued awareness campaigns have left their marks in the former empires. In Germany, there are noticeable signposts towards a “decolonial turn”. It has made inroads in the public sphere, whether this has to do with the bilateral German-Namibian negotiations over the genocide in South West Africa, the controversial Humboldt Forum, or the restitution of human remains and looted cultural artefacts.

Author’s new book, available from Hurst

The beginning of a turnaround in dealing with colonial crimes, however, is met with determined resistance by colonial-apologetic and revisionist parts of society, spearheaded by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). More recently, the German obsession with a declared Staatsräson (state reason) as unconditional solidarity with the Israeli government and its genocidal war in Gaza brought colonial amnesia back into daily politics.

Relentless efforts by local postcolonial initiatives, including a growing role by Afro Germans campaigning for the renaming of public spaces and questioning other forms of colonial memory, racism, and discrimination, have nevertheless made lasting inroads in everyday life. These, as well as the lines of defence by colonial apologetics, are included in my book, which spans from the first German involvements in the slave trade up to the current battles over the power of definition.

Ovaherero and Nama demonstrations in Berlin to protest against the Humboldt Forum. (Photo credit: Joachim Zeller)

After all, amnesia does not mean that the topic of colonialism is or has been absent from the public sphere. Rather, it means, that the dominant discourse ignores existing counter-knowledge or applies some degree of immunisation against its revelations. These are available as sources and can be accessed by anyone. Such knowledge, therefore, is not expunged from “storage memory” but rather kept away from “functional memory”, as Aleida Assmann pointed out in Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Summarising numerous critical explorations into German colonial history and its lasting trajectories since then, disclosing amnesia, denialism, and revisionism in the current responses to postcolonial initiatives in scholarly and civil society spheres, The Long Shadow of German Colonialism offers further insights concerning the challenges, and contestations relating to the subject.

OPERATION VALKYRE

How the Stauffenberg Plot Became an Alibi for German Crimes

On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg led a failed bid to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the postwar years, the coup attempt was used to claim that Germans had never accepted Nazism — and today even the far right calls the plotters its heroes.


A visitor looks at pictures of Claus von Stauffenberg at the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin on January 19, 2009. (John MacDougall / AFP via Getty Images)

BYMARC MARTORELL JUNYENT

07.20.2024

JACOBIN

“Long live sacred Germany!” Addressing the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) congress last month, parliamentarian Dirk Spaniel might have sounded like a typical nationalist sloganeer. But while this event was surrounded by protests, just weeks after the far-right party came second in the European elections, Spaniel’s words were no invention of the AfD. His remark repeated what are widely claimed to be the last words of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, hauled before a firing squad after his assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944.


Spaniel’s nod to Stauffenberg shows how contested these events remain in German politics. The AfD has, indeed, repeatedly used Stauffenberg and the July 20 plot to justify its own political positions. On the 2018 anniversary of the assassination attempt, during the election campaign in the state of Hesse, it organized a conference on the topic of “Resistance Today? From Count Stauffenberg to Constitution Article 20 IV.” The constitutional article here cited acknowledges “the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.” The meeting was attended by Beatrix von Storch, one of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in parliament.

The far-right party has surely been responsible for a particularly egregious politicization of the July 20 conspiracy against Hitler, retailored to its rebellion against the current establishment parties. From a historical perspective, though, it represents only the latest attempt at using Stauffenberg and his coconspirators for contemporary purposes, even as we reach the eightieth anniversary of the attack.
The German Alibi

German journalist Ruth Hoffmann is author of the book The German Alibi: The Myth of the Stauffenberg Assassination Attempt — How July 20, 1944 is Romanticized and Politically Instrumentalized. Hoffmann’s work, which has sadly not yet been translated into English, was shortlisted for the 2024 German Nonfiction Book Prize.

The central thesis of the book is that Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, once it became part of the postwar public discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany, was put at the service of washing away Germany’s collective guilt for the crimes of Nazism. Initially seen as nothing but traitors, in postwar years Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were slowly taken up as proof that there had been a better Germany between 1933 and 1945: a Germany that opposed Hitler, and even better, one that could be identified with the armed forces.

It is obvious that there had, indeed, been a better part of German society. If not, the Nazis would not have already needed to fill prisons and concentration camps with political opponents in 1933, years before the deportation of Jewish people began. But the identification of the anti-Nazi opposition with the conspirators that tried to kill Hitler and take power in July 1944 has always been historically dishonest. The military was certainly not the group that had sacrificed most members in the resistance against Hitler. Instead, it was the necessary element in exporting Nazi crimes from Germany to the rest of Europe.

The historical context of postwar West Germany explains why Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt was quite so central the dominant public narrative about the resistance to Hitler. Dominated during the first two decades by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Federal Republic understood itself in opposition to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), an ally of the Soviet Union. During the first decades after the war, as Hoffmann explains, the early resistance to Hitler stemming from communist and social democratic circles was seen with great suspicion. While this was in fact the biggest resistance force, it was considered to have spearheaded the formation of a communist state in the east — and thus had to be ignored or erased.

Such a lopsided approach to the history of the resistance to Hitler also affected the understanding of the July 1944 plot itself. Stauffenberg and his military colleagues received the most attention, but civilians had also been involved in the coup plans. They included, for instance, the Social Democrat Julius Leber. Moreover, Stauffenberg explored contacts with underground communists to increase the coup’s chances of success. This information tended to be elided.
A New Era?

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had solid anti-Nazi credentials, in the postwar years it could hardly use them to its advantage in a West Germany that preferred to leave the past undiscussed. The first two postwar SPD candidates for chancellor had experienced concentration camps and exile. The third, Willy Brandt, was smeared in successive election campaigns by the CDU for having spent the war in exile after seeking protection in Norway. When he became chancellor in 1969, the first member of the SPD to reach the position since 1930, Brandt famously noted that “now Hitler has finally lost the war.”

The election of Brandt followed the student protests of 1968, in which many young Germans demanded that professors, judges, and other public servants complicit in the crimes of Nazism be removed from their positions. The 1970s were a period of relative opening in the Bonn Republic’s engagement with the past. The decade began with Brandt’s sorrowful kneeling at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto — a first for a West German politician of his rank — and ended with the arrival to Germany of the TV miniseries Holocaust. The US production reached around half of the adult population in Western Germany. It triggered new conversations in the country about its historical responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.

Meanwhile, a new generation of historians, including names such as Hermann Graml or Hans Mommsen, devoted new attention to the July 20 plot. Their conclusions directly contradicted the official narrative that portrayed Stauffenberg and his coconspirators as the forerunners of the postwar constitution and democratic order. The new historical research showed that most of the men behind the assassination attempt had been convinced followers of Hitler and had long supported Nazism before eventually turning against the regime as it started to rack up setbacks on the Eastern Front. It is impossible to ascribe a single motivation to the July 20 plotters. For a minority of them — Stauffenberg not included — the war crimes in the east and the Holocaust were an important factor, argues historian Peter Steinbach. One of the key objectives was to open peace negotiations with the United States and the UK. Still, historian Ian Kershaw notes that this diplomatic opening would probably have failed. The conspirators themselves had different ideas on what a future peace should look like.

That Stauffenberg and his coconspirators had long supported Hitler is, in itself, unsurprising. The majority of those who had openly resisted Hitler from the early hours were, by 1944, either dead, in concentration camps, or in exile. Meanwhile, in a letter to his wife from occupied Poland in 1939, Stauffenberg had described the Polish population as “an unbelievable rabble, very many Jews and very much mixed population.” Stauffenberg would later help plan the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Turning Back the Clock

With the election of the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl as chancellor in 1982, the July 20 assassination attempt received new political attention. During thirteen years of SPD chancellors, only Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had participated in the July 20 official commemoration events in Berlin, namely in 1979. But in his sixteen years in power, Kohl would do so three times.

July 20 occupied a central place in Kohl’s Geschichtspolitik (history politics). The CDU chancellor presented a version of the past that was meant to be comfortable to his compatriots. In his speech upon the fortieth anniversary of the assassination attempt, Kohl noted that the world had to be shown “that the Germans were not a nation of Hitler collaborators.” He added that the July 20 conspirators wanted to “prevent Germany from the anti-Hitler coalition’s plans for separation and subjugation.”

After surviving the assassination attempt, Hitler had defamed the July 20 conspirators as a “very small clique of ambitious officers.” Kohl’s references to the Nazi period, conversely, often conveyed the impression that it was the Germans who, between 1933 and 1945, had fallen prey to a small clique made up of Hitler and his closest followers.

This can be observed in the text that Kohl contributed, also in 1984, to a book on the July 20 assassination attempt. Kohl wrote that the Nazis’ efforts to transform Germany had failed because “Hitler did not succeed in dragging the German nation into the abyss of his immorality and cynicism.” He added that the German resistance had “saved German history from its perversion through the dictator.”
Remembering July 20 Today

In the 1990s, Germany’s media-political sphere took more serious steps to critically engage with the past. In 1998, and later in 2002 in a broader legislative effort, the German parliament declared null and void thousands of sentences against political opponents and military deserters. The rehabilitation of such deserters was, however, opposed by the Christian Democratic Union.

When Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, she took a significantly different approach to July 20 and the Nazi period compared to her political mentor, Kohl. In her speech on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the assassination attempt, Merkel noted that Stauffenberg’s story “is not the only story of resistance — in the same way, July 20 does not mark the only act of resistance.”

She added that “from the beginning, there were brave people who stood up against the National Socialist regime.” These, reminded Merkel, remained a minority. The chancellor also said — in an apparent a call to stop idealizing Stauffenberg and his coconspirators — that after the war there were many misunderstandings about them, including certain “exaggerations.”

The history of the German resistance to Hitler also had protagonists who — unlike Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators — long saw the Nazis for what they really were. Most of them do not have the kind of spectacular history that gains Hollywood attention, as Stauffenberg did when Tom Cruise played him in the 2008 movie Valkyrie. At least one of them, however, does have such a history. Georg Elser was a carpenter and a member of a communist organization during the Weimar Republic. After hiding over multiple nights in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller beerhall, where Hitler was due to speak on November 8, 1939, Elser managed to set up a secret door close to the speaker’s rostrum. When the day arrived, he placed a bomb there. But it exploded a few minutes too late, as Hitler had decided to leave Munich sooner than expected and was no longer there at the time of the detonation. Interrogated by the Gestapo, Elser explained his goal had been to stop the war that had started two months before with the invasion of Poland.

Elser’s story did not find much resonance in the Federal Republic of Germany following World War II. His communist past made him too uncomfortable a hero. In his speech on the fortieth anniversary of the July 20 plot, Chancellor Kohl referred to Elser in passing as the “unsuccessful assassin.” He did not use the words “unsuccessful” or “assassin” even once in reference to the Stauffenberg plot or its leaders.

Today, the symbol of Stauffenberg and his coconspirators has become too powerful to ignore. The AfD and other smaller German far-right groups often present themselves as a form of modern-day “resistance” to an alleged “dictatorship” in Germany. The answer to this challenge is not to overlook the problematic past of Stauffenberg and his coconspirators, as has too often been the case. Nor should the story be merely left to the far right to exploit. In The German Alibi, Hoffman explains that, after being initially seen as traitors, Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were presented as heroes. But when we examine their real history, it’s hard to see how they can count as either.

CONTRIBUTOR
Marc Martorell Junyent is an author and researcher based in Munich.