Henryk M Broder är en av Tysklands mest klarsynta journalister. Han har i många år fört en oftast ganska
ensam kamp mot antisemitismen och islamiseringen
av Europa.
I denna artikel, ursprungligen skriven för Der Spiegel
och sedan i en utökad version publicerad av norska
Human Rights Service, jämför han dagens europeiska
underdåniga krypande för islamismen med kollaboratörerna
under Världskriget. Totalitarismens lockelse är lika stark
idag som för 75, 50 eller tjugofem år sedan...
Översatt till engelska av Bruce Bawer, amerikansk
invandrare till Europa och också han en av de klar-
synta författarna i dagens Europa.
****
Fela Broder was not a writer but a simple Krakow housewife.
Fela Broder was not a writer but a simple Krakow housewife.
Still, she loved to tell stories that were neither appropriated
nor invented, but that were, rather, accounts of things that
they had experienced and survived between 1939 and 1945.
But the immediate post-war era, too, provided a good deal
of narrative material. The Nazis were gone, but the
collaborators remained, the so-called kapos, Poles as well as
Jews, who had performed auxiliary services. Most of them
had simply been trying to save their lives, or, at least, to
grab a little something for themselves. But some, of course,
had performed their jobs with enthusiasm.
**
One of these kapos, said Fela Broder, was a particularly
**
One of these kapos, said Fela Broder, was a particularly
vicious sadist. His specialty was whipping those guilty of
minor disciplinary violations until they could neither stand,
walk, or breathe.
He did far more than the camp administrators expected of him.
On a good day, though, he would turn a blind eye to infractions
or give a prisoner a piece of bread. Even a kapo, now and then,
wanted to be a man.
**
His wife and my mother knew each other from before the war.
When it was all over, she went to see my mother and asked
**
His wife and my mother knew each other from before the war.
When it was all over, she went to see my mother and asked
her to testify in court as a witness for her husband.
"Fela," said the wife of the kapo, "who could imagine that the
Germans would lose the war?"
If you want to understand the phenomenon of collaboration,
If you want to understand the phenomenon of collaboration,
the anticipatory obedience and "identification with the aggressor,”
you need only to understand this one sentence. It is brilliant
in its simplicity. After the Nazis, in an astonishingly short time,
had brought a large part of Europe under their control, it was
not only the remaining decent Germans who found it difficult
to imagine that Hitler and his followers could ever lose the war.
Those who had not emigrated in time, as Oskar Maria Graf did,
went into internal exile, as did Erich Kästner.
Under such circumstances, at a distance of more than 60 years,
one cannot blame the collaborators for being ready and willing
to come to an accommodation with the potential victors if they
were offered the opportunity to do so.
The idea that the triumphant Nazi war machine could ever run
out of gas was beyond imagining.
**
So it was, too, when the victorious Soviet Union, at the height of
its power, crushed the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia:
no one could doubt that the Red Army would soon be on the
march once again to crack down on dissenters.
The peace movement in the Federal Republic, whose sponsorship
by the KGB and the Stasi was still unknown, supported unilateral
disarmament, and was entirely sincere in its conviction as to the
correctness of the slogan "better red than dead.”
Helmut Schmidt and other proponents of the "dual strategy"
– to simultaneously rearm and negotiate – were regarded as
warmongers who embraced the risk of a nuclear inferno even
as they stared into the face of the reality that the Soviet Union,
the home of all friends of peace, was invincible.
Those who picked an argument with it were doomed to destruction.
More than 30 years later, history is repeating itself, except that
More than 30 years later, history is repeating itself, except that
this time the color on the horizon is not red but green.
**
Islam – or, as some prefer to say, Islamism – is on the
Islam – or, as some prefer to say, Islamism – is on the
march, though it is employing different means from
those that the Communists used.
On the one hand there is the demographic weapon that
is now changing the face of Europe, as seen in the debates
about the construction of minarets and the wearing of
burkas; on the other hand, there is an ideology that many
enlightened people, especially intellectuals, find quite
attractive, not despite but because of its simplicity:
the world is bad, and we want to and will make it better.
We know how to do it.
If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Your choice.
There are even people who are volunteering for service.
There are even people who are volunteering for service.
Not to stand athwart the oncoming superpower, which
would be dangerous, but to show it the way, just as a
pilot guides a ship into port. Among these people are
intelligent and educated individuals who could not be
seduced by slick ad slogans to buy a flat-screen TV or
tempted by last-minute deals for Caribbean vacations,
but who are now succumbing to the charms of a new
totalitarianism.
***
