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On 2/20/15 11:40 AM, Sheldon Ranz wrote:
Elsasser talks like - and his name looks like - the Strasser brothers of 'Left-Nazi' infamy.
Yes, it is really quite fascinating that the German ultraright that wants to cleanse the Motherland of Untermenschen is so gung-ho "anti-imperialist". Btw, it is not the first time in history that such bizarre red-brown alliances took place:
The German party was then thrown into a new crisis over the Treaty of Rapallo, a peace agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union concluded at the end of April in 1922. This treaty raised the same sort of contradictions as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. How could Communists call for the overthrow of a regime that the Russian party had just pledged to maintain peaceful relations with? Stalin resolved this contradiction in a straightforward manner. He declared that anti-fascist agitation should immediately stop. The Communist Parties of 1922 had not become degenerated and still tried to maintain a revolutionary outlook, no matter the difficulties.
Karl Radek did not help matters unfortunately. He interpreted the Treaty of Rapallo as a go-ahead to support the German bourgeoisie against the dominant European capitalisms, especially France. Germany was forced to sign a punitive reparations agreement after WWI and was not able to satisfy the Entente powers. France then marched into the Ruhr in order to seize control of the mines and steel mills. The German capitalist class screamed bloody murder and proto-fascist armed detachments marched into the Ruhr to confront the French troops.
Radek interpreted these German right-wing counter-measures as a sign of progressive nationalism and argued that a bloc of all classes was necessary to confront Anglo-French imperialism. At the height of the anti-French armed struggle in the Ruhr, the German Communist Party took Radek's cue and began to issue feelers to the right-wing nationalists.
On June 20, 1922 Radek went completely overboard and made a speech proposing a de facto alliance between the Communists and the Fascists. This, needless to say, was in his capacity as official Comintern representative to the German party. It was at a time when Trotsky was still in good graces in the Soviet Union. Nobody seemed to raise an eyebrow when Radek urged that the Communists commemorate the death of Albert Schlageter, a freecorps figher who died in the Ruhr and was regarded as a martyr of the right-wing, a German Timothy McVeigh so to speak. Radek's stated that "...we believe that the great majority of nationalist minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the Workers."
Radek's lunacy struck a chord with the German Communist ultraleftists who went even further in their enthusiasm for the right-wing fighters. Ruth Fischer gave a speech at a gathering of right-wing students where she echoed fascist themes:
"Whoever cries out against Jewish capital...is already a fighter for his class, even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts...But...how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klockner?...Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the "folkish" side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region."
full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm
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