How the world was saved from a nuclear catastrophe

Most people of a certain age will clearly remember where they were and what they were doing when the Cuban missile crisis erupted in 1962. We all thought our days were numbered and a nuclear world war was about to be unleashed. This, though, wasn’t the last time of such a scare. In 1983 the world once again stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, but few realised it. ABLE ARCHER won’t mean anything to most people.

Ronald Reagan was elected president of the USA in 1980 and ushered in a period of aggressive armaments build-up and crusader rhetoric against the ‘evil empire’. He, along with his close political ally, Margaret Thatcher embarked on a new and dangerous confrontational policy. He surrounded himself with fanatical anti-communist warriors, like Richard Perle (the Prince of Darkness), Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush etc who were all determined to confront the Soviet Union. After years of detente, the Helsinki Accords and a general easing of tension, the world was once again plunged into a new phase of the Cold War that threatened to become very hot with these dangerous brinkmanship policies.

Reagan declared peaceful coexistence a dead duck. He gave the green light to a giant rearmament programme with the idea of forcing the Soviet Union into an armaments race it couldn’t win and thus tip the strategic balance in favour of the USA. He announced his SDI (Star Wars) project and ushered in a new arms race with the aim of bringing about the ruin of the Soviet economy in the process.

Neo-conservative Perle put in place plans for a doable and winnable, limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union by means of a carefully orchestrated, decapitation strike out of the blue. In US neo-con circles the talk was about knocking out the Soviet command, control and communications centres (C3), leaving the Red Army ‘running about the farmyard like a headless chicken’ without being able to fire a single missile back. To this end the Pentagon prepared the stationing of new, highly accurate, intermediate range Pershing II missiles in Europe, which had the capability of decapitating the command, control and communication centers of the political and military leadership of the Soviet Union within five minutes from start in Germany. Thus this deployment would clearly be a game changer and tip the strategic balance decisively in favour of the US/NATO. Washington and NATO publicly justified this planned undermining of the East-West-balance as a necessary reaction to the new, medium range SS20 missiles the Soviet had just introduced in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the Pershing II, however, the SS 20 – while augmenting Soviet options in case of war in Europe – did not upset the strategic balance, as they could not hit C3-targets in the USA.

In 1979 as part of its medium range nuclear modernization programme NATO took the decision to deploy new cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe. The first particularly destabilising Pershing missiles were deployed in West Germany in autumn 1983. Because of this provocative escalation and the concomitant reduction of launch warning time tensions were stretched to breaking point. All the more, as the Soviet leadership was absolutely convinced by then, that the US were seriously planning a nuclear surprise attack under the cover of a large scale manouevre. In order to gain advance knowledge of such plans, the KGB and the Soviet Military Intelligence GRU within the framework of operation RYAN had been ordered already back in 1979 to give top priority to scan and collect all sorts of information that could indicate preparation for such an attack and which would allow – if possible – to pre-empt it through a counter attack. Through a series of unfortunate accidents, world events and other technical developments by autumn 1983 entire sets of indicators, some true, some by mistake, that fitted the Soviet high command’s anticipation of how the lead in scenario of the US/NATO C3 decapitation attack against the USSSR would look like flashed red alert. And while NATO moved into the field for its giant Able Archer exercise close to the German-German border, Soviet nuclear weapons were readied for the preemptive strike. At one time, Soviet nuclear bombers were sitting on the tarmac in their East German airbases, engines running, waiting for the order to go. If this order had come, most likely nuclear holocaust, at least for Europe and the UK would have ensued, if not all-out nuclear war.

We were spared this end largely due to the efforts of one man: Rainer Rupp, who at the time held a top job in NATO headquarters in Brussels, but at the same time was secretly working for the GDR foreign intelligence service HVA. He was not your common or garden spy, but a man who was prepared to give vital information to the GDR and Soviet Union in order to help ensure continued peace in Europe and to help prevent an accidental or deliberate outbreak of hostilities. He was convinced, as he could see from NATO’s own “cosmic top secret” documents that the Soviet Union was not planning a deliberate attack or first strike against the USA nor a conventional invasion of Western Europe.

Rupp had become politically radicalized as a student after seeing the re-emergence of neo-Nazi forces in Germany and witnessing the virulent anti-communism that was being whipped up. He was not prepared to sit idly by and let a third world war take place.

As a highly intelligent and assiduous worker, he soon rose within the NATO hierarchy to a position of trust and responsibility. He knew every detail of the plans concerning a potential third world war, whether it involved a strategy of Massive Retaliation, (Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD) or Flexible Response. In either case, central Europe would have become a place of unbelievable destruction, with a massive death toll and widespread contamination.

A conventionally waged war was not considered an option by NATO because it felt the Soviet Union would win such a war. Its strategy involved the early and first use of tactical nuclear weapons, already stationed close to borders to the Warsaw Pact - the policy was based on the concept of either ‘fire them or lose them’ if a border conflict flared up. Massive Retaliation was certainly not an immediate option for either side, as they both knew that in all likelihood they would both be doomed. Confining the theatre of war to Europe using the flexible response option was certainly very much in the interests of the USA.

Richard Perle, State Secretary in the Pentagon for planning and policy, was of the opinion that a limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union could be fought and won without massive damage to the US. Back in the early 1980s they knew that the Soviet Union had an advantage in terms of conventional weaponry as well as the large size of its armed forces and would prevail in a non-nuclear war scenario. Therefore the nuclear ‘beheading’ option appealed to the criminal warmongers in the Pentagon as it seemed to present a realistic chance of succeeding.

In the autumn of 1983 the worst case scenario looked s if it was about to unfold. Reagan’s crusader rhetoric and his Star Wars programme, together with the decision to station Pershings in Europe had raised tensions. The Soviet Union now had only minutes of warning in the event of a nuclear attack. It considered that NATO’s previous policy of defence preparation had now been transformed into one of waging a pre-emptive war. It had already experienced surprise invasions into its territory in the Second World War, which cost the USSR 27 million lives, and it didn’t wish to be caught out again.

The political tension had been further sharpened in that same year by the downing of the Korean airliner KAL 007 on 1 September. The full story, why that passenger plane deviated by almost 90 degrees from its course to deeply penetrate a highly sensitive Soviet defence area where strategic missile were hidden, has still not been adequately explained. But the incident took place at a time when the USA had been actively provoking Soviet defence reactions at different places along its long borders in order to assess the reaction of the air defence systems, monitor communications, identify and locate the respective C3 centers. The inexplicable straying of Korean Airlines 007 into Soviet airspace over the sensitive region of Kamchatka and the refusal of the Korean pilots to respond to calls to change course made the Russians doubly fearful. Rupp has serious doubts that the deviation of the Korean Airlines plane over Soviet airspace was a genuine mistake, all the more, as he has seen months later a secret assessment about the Soviet C3-centers in the Far East, which had been sent by the US-military intelligence Agency DIA to the Situation Centre in NATO where Rupp served on a rotating basis as Chairman of the Current Intelligence Group. In this document the DIA called the successful identification of the C3 centers in der Soviet Far East as “a windfall gain” of the downing of KAL007

Many years later, Rupp’s suspicion war corroborated, at least indirectly, by statements from a former high-ranking CIA officer and subsequent official CIA-historian Ben Fisher. He admitted that after Reagan’s assumption of the presidency in 1980 a highly dangerous period began with extremely provocative violations of Soviet borders on land, sea and air in order to test its responses.

ABLE ARCHER took place in that context. The planned combined NATO exercises for the autumn of 1983 were viewed by the Soviets as a pretext for a first strike. They were not prepared to wait for a first strike to hit them and they desperately needed to know urgently if such a plan was indeed about to be put into practice. They were convinced that ABLE ARCHER was not simply an exercise but a ruse to initiate a first strike. The Soviets knew that after the stationing of new US missiles in Europe they would only have a warning time of around 5 to 8 minutes if they wished to retaliate in the case of a pre-emptive strike. Any misunderstanding on either side could lead rapidly to a nuclear catastrophe.

The exercises were carried out under very realistic conditions and the scenario from Moscow’s perspective appeared to be a preparation for a first nuclear strike. The manoeuvres took place over ten days, beginning on 2 November and involved all Western Europe. The aim was a simulation of a co-ordinated deployment of nuclear weapons and their use. What was particularly alarming was that there were new elements in the exercise: middle-range nuclear weapons were brought onto the field for the first time and absolute radio silence was maintained; a new code format was introduced for communications. And, for the first time, leaders of all the NATO countries were involved which also alerted Moscow to the unusual high political significance of the exercises. Moscow also thought, wrongly, that the USA had put its troops on the highest alarm stage, DEFCON 1. In reality DEFCON 1 was only simulated during the exercise.

Convinced of an immediate US attack, the Soviet Union put its own strategic nuclear forces on red alert. The smallest mistake would have unleashed a catastrophe. Even Gorbachev later declared that the situation at the time was as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis, but with an even greater nuclear potential.

The US had already been holding its missile forces in a state of high alert preparedness since 1981. Rupp, because of his inside knowledge, felt the Soviet concerns were unfounded. After all, he himself was involved in the NATO-Situation Center (War Room) at the highest level in the NATO exercises and would have known if Able Archer had been used as a cloak to lunch a surprise attack against the USSR. Moscow was informed of this, but still remained extremely suspicious. They demanded firm proof that this was the case. So Rupp, at great danger to himself, was able to provide it and by doing so was able to reassure the Soviet military leadership and head off the start of an accidental nuclear holocaust.

As a result of his later exposure as a spy, due to the defection of a top GDR counter intelligence officer in 1989, he was given a 12 years jail sentence in his home country of Germany. At the same time a former Nazi guard from Auschwitz who was co-responsible for the deaths of thousands was handed down a three and a half year sentence. West German agents who had been imprisoned in the GDR were all released immediately.

Years later, at a conference on international espionage in 2005 in Berlin, the former CIA-head for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Milton Bearden, congratulated the former Head of East German foreign intelligence HVA, the legendary Markus Wolf, saying that thanks to his excellently placed source in NATO-HQ in Brussels peace had been saved in 1983, as he had ‘been able to calm the recipients in Moscow’ and in this way, avoid a nuclear war.

Review of: Germany: memories of a nation

(16 Oct-25 January 2015)

Room 35, British Museum

An exhibition in Britain which attempts to illuminate the contribution made by the German nation to world culture is long overdue. Many Brits would be hard put to think of anything German beyond nazis, jackboots, humourlessness, lederhosen and beer gardens.

At its height, from the 16th century onwards, German culture and language came to dominate much of central Europe, from Basle (in Switzerland) in the west, to Prague (now the capital of the Czech Republic) and Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) in the East, as well as the outlying Hanseatic cities around the Baltic and North Sea, in Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Denmark. 

It could be argued that Germany, as a nation, has had, since classical times, more impact on European and even world culture than any other European nation. Its philosophers, scientists, writers, artists, and composers, as well as its bankers have profoundly influenced the way we live and think today. Germany, situated at the core of Europe has more common borders with other states than any other European nation; this has contributed to its problems as well as being an advantage.

This curators of this new exhibition, looking back over 600 years of history, have selected 200 German objects around which they have attempted to weave a cohesive cultural and historical fabric. It is, of course, over ambitious, and unavoidably reflects contemporary political perspectives as much as it offers genuine illumination. Minimal textual explanations don’t help either. While such modern approaches to museum exhibitions can provide genuine insights and offer illuminating connections, they can also create short circuits and undermine more profound understandings.

The curators of this exhibition readily admit that they have ignored the many philosophers and musicians Germany has produced, but they have also ignored medical pioneers, scientists and most writers. There is also much else that has been ignored and their reasons for selecting some objects and not others are obscure if not downright obtuse.

Historically transformative events like the Peasants’ War in the 16th century, the 19th century struggle for German unification and the 1848 revolution, as well as the student rebellion of 1968 are all ignored.

The exhibition was conceived as a response to the anniversary, in November, of the fall of the Wall, so that in itself perhaps indicates the political justification.

The visitor is met with a video of milling, euphoric crowds celebrating the fall of the Wall, together with a poster of that time with the slogan, ‘We are one people’ on a map of Germany.

The wall text tells us that ‘The citizens of East and West Germany had lived for decades under very different political systems, but they shared many deep memories, which they brought to the new state.’ It gives no intimation that West Germany imposed its own systems on the East and has denied the former citizens of the GDR the right to make their own contribution, never mind sharing in the creation of a new Germany. The text goes on to tell us that East German demands for more freedom and democracy in 1989 ‘shifted to an emphasis on speeding up reunification’. No mention of the fact that a genuine demand for more freedoms in the East was hijacked by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for his own electoral purposes and that it was he who demanded an acceleration up of the unification process before East Germans could fully develop their own concepts.

The exhibits take the visitor on a confusing and whirlwind tour. From two delightful portraits by Cranach, including his famous Luther portrait, together with a Holbein and three large, anodyne landscapes by Carl Carus alongside a mini Caspar David Friedrich. There is a Kaethe Kollwitz self-portrait and a woodcut of her memorial to the murdered communist Karl Liebknecht. This is in connection with a description of her birthplace Koenigsberg (today Kaliningrad, but we are dubiously informed by the caption that ‘it remains in Russia today’, not that it is now part of Russia as a result of the post-war settlement).

The Bauhaus movement is highlighted with a superb baby’s cradle which looks like a practical demonstration in geometry and is a magnificent work of art in itself: A v-shaped cot, its sides painted in bright red and yellow, is bound at each end by two black hoops of steel forming its rocking part. It’s like a three-dimensional Mondrian painting, and was designed by Peter Keler in 1922. There are also several small posters of Bauhaus design.

A Gutenberg bible symbolises German advances in printing and literacy and their connection with Luther’s 16th century Reformation movement that took Europe by storm. 

Surprisingly the exhibition does include one of the original Communist Manifestos and of Marx’s Capital, but they are somewhat incongruous here with no wider connections.

Goethe is given pride of place in the form of the famous Tischbein full-length portrait, but his contemporary Schiller who was arguably the better playwright, is not.

Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble are represented by a small model of the scenery for Mother Courage, but no mention of the fact that Brecht and his theatre were based in the GDR.

A tacky model of the Friedrichstrasse Underground and check point linking West and East Berlin is included, probably because it was rescued from the GDR’s Ministry of State Security and was ‘used for Stasi training to ensure that no East German escapes’. A wet suit which was, the caption says, used by an East German who tried to escape to the West symbolises ‘the many people who attempted to leave the impoverished communist state of East Germany’. (According to UN data, the GDR had one of the highest standards of living in Europe - something any unbiassed visitor could validate, even if it was much lower than its Marshall-Plan aided counterpart in the west. Most of those who left the GDR did so for reasons other than ‘fleeing poverty’)

Hans Barlach’s powerful bronze sculpture Floating Figure is a fitting commemoration of human resilience and hope, even in times of war. But again, no mention is made of the fact that he and his friend and contemporary, Kaethe Kollwitz were both celebrated in the GDR, their portraits on postage stamps, their works revered and monographs published. In the West they had both been largely ignored until after the Wall came down.

The nazi period is dealt with largely in terms of the holocaust and the extermination of the Jews, with no mention of the mass extermination of Slavs, gypsies, gays, the disabled, socialists, trade unionists and communists. Nor is the role played by big business in Hitler’s rise mentioned.

Historical processes and key events are given only superficial coverage. That the setting up of a the Federal Republic of Germany in the western sectors in 1949, soon followed by the introduction of a separate currency was in contravention of understandings laid down in the Potsdam Agreement is totally ignored. The setting up of the GDR and introduction of its own currency in response to the former is glossed over. The museum text says glibly that ‘two states were established - the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic’ , implying that the former preceded the latter, and with no further explanation.

An example of a German bank note from the the massive inflationary period during the twenties is shown in connection with the introduction of new post-war currencies in West and then East Germany. These, the caption tells us, ‘reflect the different perspectives on German history…East German notes feature revolutionary figures such as Karl Marx, while West German notes took their cue from the age of the artist Albrecht Duerer’. The fact that of the five GDR banknotes, two featured Goethe and Schiller is conveniently ignored as this would upset the convenient black and white political imagery.

The exhibition is receiving considerable hype here in Britain but clearly also in Germany if the press opening is anything to go by. There appeared to be more German journalists and ‘experts’ than British milling around - such a rare occasion is it for the British to be taking a serious look at German history and culture.

Although the actual exhibition is limited and in quite a small venue, there is a daily broadcast over six weeks by the Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, of over 30 episodes dealing with the exhibition and where he goes into more detail. However, even here he replicates the jaundiced view of the GDR experience and sometimes historical details are either factually wrong or distorted. He has also written an accompanying book to be published on 6 November. The museum is also hosting a number of lectures by the usual suspects, film showings and public forums. 

Showing in the British Museum cinema as one of the events around the exhibition is the film The Murderers are Among US, the first post war film to deal with the nazi period. It was made by the DEFA film company and largely shot in the Soviet sector. Originally the film was to be titled Der Mann den ich töten werde (The Man I will kill) but the script and the title were changed because the Soviet authorities were afraid that viewers could interpret it as a call for vigilante justice and the killing of former nazis. 

Murderers Among Us was first shown on 15th October 1946 in the Soviet sector. It was shown on GDR television on November 1st, 1955 and in the Federal Republic only in November, 1971. That, too, is something you are unlikely to be told. Nor will the many anti-nazi films made by the GDR. be mentioned or shown.

While this exhibition has to be welcomed as an overdue gesture of recognition for German culture and as a contribution to a better understanding between our two peoples, it is also very disappointing because it doesn’t question simplistic shibboleths or the Federal Republic’s monopoly of the interpretation of more recent history.

END

Letter to Prof Lodge of Limerick University re our letter exchange in the Guardian about the GDR.

16 October 2014

Dear Prof. Lodge

Thank you for your letter and the paper by Anthony Glees you sent. Yes, short letters in a newspaper are never an adequate means of expressing opinions or for putting over cohesive arguments. 

Like you, I abhor torture and maltreatment wherever it takes place and whosoever practises it. And, as I made clear in my Guardian letter, I certainly don’t want to appear to be an apologist for or defender of activities and behaviour of the GDR’s state security services. 

What motivates me to take up this issue is a determination to counter what has become the characterisation of the whole GDR experience as a ‘Stasi’ one and that the country was simply a totalitarian, oppressive and unjust state (Unrechtsstaat in Federal German terminology); there is no attempt by western politicians, historians or academics to offer a more differentiated picture or to undertake a genuine attempt to understand the GDR experience through the lives of those who lived it. 

There have been a multitude of books written by those who lived in the GDR about their experiences (including my own small booklet) but these, with the exception of those that confirm the already jaundiced picture, have been totally ignored. I lived and studied in the GDR for four years. I also married (twice) GDR women who were born and grew up, studied and worked there before coming to the UK. My mother taught in the GDR for ten years and continued to live there after her retirement.

My argument is simply that while the State Security apparatus played a powerful, significant and often unsavoury role in the country, its activities did not impact negatively on everyone by any means and many people led normal lives without any contact with them at all.  Of course, if you were an active dissident or operated against the system, you would undoubtedly find yourself in conflict with them. But, after all, every nation has its security apparatus (just look at how the security forces here have infiltrated protest groups) and some are more or less brutal and oppressive. In the GDR, the aim of the security services was also to protect what they deemed to be national security. 

I also agree with you, that a definition of torture (although “the use of psychological and/or physical abuse in order to terrorise or cow a victim to extract a confession or information” is a decent enough definition I feel) is not always easy and there are degrees of brutality. I am sure the Stasi did use methods at times that were certainly not commensurate with what I would deem ‘humane treatment’, although they would be at the less brutal spectrum of torture, I would argue. And it is likely that more brutal methods or mistreatment were implemented in the early years (late forties and fifties) and certainly less, if at all, in the later decades.

Anthony Glees’s paper which I read, only serves to underline my point. His premiss is that the GDR was an ‘Unrechtsstaat’ and he attempts to prove his point with all the weapons at his disposal, and with no effort of balance. His sources are almost if not totally exclusively West German or British.

One needs to ask: why if the GDR was such a horrific prison camp have there been no more than a handful of ex-Stasi officers convicted (despite thousands of investigated cases) - and the few that were convicted have received small fines or bail. Why if the system was so horrendous have around a third of former GDR citizens regularly voted for the PDS/Die Linke, the ‘successor party’ to the old ruling SED? And why do many more feel that with unification the baby was perhaps thrown out with the bathwater and they may have lost more than they have gained?

There is an interesting book written by an Austrian CIA operative (together with the Stasi man who interrogated him) who was captured by GDR authorities and held in Hohenschoenhausen: Verheizt und Vergessen by H. Sieberer and H. Kierstein (Berlin: edition ost 2005). While he doesn’t paint a glowing picture, he underlines that he was never maltreated or tortured and appears to have more anger about his incompetent CIA handlers than his GDR captors!

Or the book, Die DDR unterm Luegenberg [the GDR under the mountain of lies], edition ost, 2010, written by Ralph Hartmann, the GDR’s former ambassador to Yugoslavia. In the book the author has a chapter titled, ‘Stasi-Folter und Stasi -Terror’ (Stasi torture and Stasi terror) in which he demolishes the accusations of systematic torture carried out by the state security forces. In this same chapter he deals specifically with Hohenschoenhausen and relates that the director of that prison museum and a chief ‘crown prosecution witness’ is Hubertus Knabe, a West German, and well-known and oft quoted ‘SED expert’. On taking up his post he declared  Hohenschoenhausen to be ‘the Dachau of communism’. he alleges that the ‘torture cells’ that are on show have been fabricated post-GDR. There is also a train carriage there and railway tracks ‘to transport prisoners’ which are clearly supposed to be a reminder not of Dachau but of Auschwitz. However in GDR times there never was a railway track or trains for transportation to and from the prison. The museum is well-funded by the government because it serves to underline the official demonisation of the GDR.  The book’s author maintains that the present museum has had other elements and evidence of torture added since which were not there when it was used as a prison. 

In Glees’s paper he quotes figures for deaths in Hohenschoenhausen  ‘of between 900 - 3,000’ [a large and inexplicable margin of difference] and that ‘water torture was used there regularly’ but gives no source for this. His other source for such figures is Die Gedenkstaette fuer die Opfer politischer Gewalt et al., Die Vergangenheit (1996), an institution set up by the Federal government with the express purpose of denigrating the GDR.

But even Glees writes that there were 173,000 IMs (Stasi informants) - hardly the one in three quoted by Neil MacGregor in his original article (that would be over 5 million!).

Glees is well-known as a very conservative figure, specialising in security issues and with close ties to the security services. In 2010 was appointed a professor of trust (Vertrauensdozent) by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Not exactly a neutral observer!

There was a lot wrong with the GDR and there was serious distortion and restriction of democratic rights, civil rights and personal freedoms, but it was not a nazi-like state and nor was it one big prison camp.

I hesitate in quoting Goebbels but his alleged statement that if you quote a lie often enough it will stick is certainly valid in this respect.

Regards

Three letters on the occasion of a forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum and a six-week series of broadcasts on the BBC have been sent for publication but it remains to be seen whether they will be.

While a new perspective on German culture is long overdue, as is a departure from the cliche's of Germany being a country identified only with nazis, jack boots, lederhosen, the SS and the the perpetrators of the holocaust, there also needs to be a proper assessment of the role played by the GDR in modern German history away from the cliches of it being reduced to the 'stasi state' and a successor to the nazi dictatorship.

27 September 2014

Dear Sir/Madam

Two of the iconic cultural figures mentioned in Neil MacGregor’s article (Made in Germany in Guardian Review - 27 September), Ernst Barlach, and Käthe Kollwitz, were celebrated and promoted in the GDR (East Germany), although the former was a committed Christian and the latter a pacifist. 

I hope the new exhibition in the British Museum and the BBC series accompanying it will not simply remove the contribution made to German culture by the GDR, as is usually done. After all, two of the greatest theatre men of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht and the Austrian opera director Walter Felsenstein, worked and produced some of their best works there and were supported and heavily subsidised by the government. And Heiner Müller, one of Germany’s best modern dramatists was a GDR citizen.The country’s orchestras, under conductors like Kurt Masur were world famous for the excellence of their music-making, the renowned tenor Peter Schreier and baritone Olaf Bär also learned their handiwork there. This welcome exhibition should be an opportunity to reassess German culture, but without the distorting lenses of the Cold War.

28 September 2014

Dear Sir,

To open his article on German culture (Made in Germany in the Guardian’s Weekend Review - 27 September), Neil MacGregor highlights a wetsuit used by someone attempting to flee East Germany. This is the asinine equivalent of exhibiting a hood used by British troops in their maltreatment of Northern Irish and Iraqi prisoners as an icon of British culture!

He also equates the ‘two [German] dictatorships’ by writing of the ‘…situation under both the Nazis and the Stasi.’ It needs to be stated unequivocally that the Nazis were the government of 1930s Germany, imprisoning tens of thousands of political dissidents, torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands of others in concentration camps for racial and political reasons. The regime also carried out a cultural witch-hunt, burning books and demonising ‘decadent’ artists. The Stasi did not run the GDR, it was merely a very powerful security apparatus, but always under the control of the Socialist Unity Party. It did not imprison thousands or torture its perceived enemies, even if it was often heavy handed and unjust. MacGregor also re-iterates the incredible, often used, but unsubstantiated figure of  ‘…one in three of the population were informing on their friends’ to the Stasi. The GDR was a socialist state, even if centrally and bureaucratically governed, and most people lived their lives with little or no relations or connection with the state security services.

MacGregor also writes about Meissen in the same distorted vein: ‘ …so the factory set up by August the Strong received commissions to make official portraits of the leaders of the East German Communist state.’ The factory’s main role in the GDR continued to be to produce traditional first class Dresden porcelain, but it did indeed make small ceramic medallions, mostly commemorating German cultural figures like Goethe, Lessing and Schiller and extremely few of ‘communist figures’.

Dear Madam/Sir,

The author of the feature Made in Germany in the Guardian’s Weekend Review (27th September) writes that ‘Later that year the Russians removed the entire art collection [from Dresden after allied bombing in February 1945]. This may convey the impression that they stole the collection, but in fact they removed it to keep it safe and returned every single piece once the Gemaelde Gallerie was restored. Russian forces took great care to prevent looting of art treasures in Germany and in fact, immediately the war was over, promoted the rapid re-establishment of theatres and music-making, as well as encouraging and supporting artists to begin working again.

It was Britain and the USA that carpet bombed what was widely acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful and culturally-rich cities in the world. They did this with no reflection on what they were destroying - an architecturally unique city containing an immense collection of some of the world’s most valuable art works. The war was clearly coming to an end; Russian troops were poised on the Czech-German border only miles away from Dresden and the city was packed with refugees fleeing the front. By any measure that destruction was a an act of human and cultural barbarism.

Building up to a Third World War?

It is always tempting the gods to cite the past as a prediction of the future or to draw false parallels, but history can teach us lessons even if our leaders rarely choose to learn from them.

The Middle East and indeed the whole Islamic world is in catastrophic turmoil with no clear protagonists or outcomes. This has led to an unprecedented destruction of cities and infrastructure across the whole region, millions of refugees and traumatised families. We know this is largely as a result of western meddling and military incursion, but the meddlers are now at a loss to find the magic to put the genie back in the bottle and are seemingly indifferent to the enormity of the human cost. 

Concurrently, we have a dangerous escalation of civil conflict in Ukraine at the heart of Europe. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe and the world have not faced such an incendiary situation. The parallels with the situation before both the First and Second World Wars are striking, as are the blindness to the dangers and the refusal to learn the necessary lessons by the political elite. In fact they themselves are deliberately distorting history and fanning the flames of conflict for ulterior motives.

Using particularly inflammatory rhetoric, Cameron tells European leaders that ‘to appease Putin over Ukraine as Britain and France did with Adolf Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War’ would be encouraging Russian expansionism. He told them ‘Putin had to be stopped from seizing all of Ukraine’. Such comments are not only offensive to Putin and the Russian people but a grave insult to the men and women who sacrificed their lives in their millions to save us from German fascism.

Without proper evidence, the Pentagon and the US administration have accused Russia of firing rockets from Russian territory into Ukraine. As ‘proof’ James Clapper, Director of US National Intelligence, presented some grainy, indistinct satellite images. But EU leaders are once again willing to accept this ‘evidence’ at face value and follow the US lead in escalating the Ukrainian conflict. Clapper is well-known as a notorious liar: he has misinformed the US public on a number of occasions, under oath in the senate. Interestingly the satellite photos he showed were not from the National Security Agency or other US spy sources, but from a private satellite company, Global Scope.

A memorandum to German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, by the the steering group of the US organisation,Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), in response to the war in Ukraine is salutary. It addresses allegations from the US and NATO of a Russian invasion in support of rebel forces. In the memorandum they urged the Chancellor to be suspicious of US intelligence. They stated that satellite photos released to the press are not a sufficient basis for the claim of an invasion, likening it to the case for war in Iraq (a reference to the dodgy ones used by Colin Powell in the UN to justify the invasion of Iraq), and suggested the claims of a Russian invasion are a cover for a series of successes by the rebels.

Western media have completely  ignored the mounting refugee crisis in eastern Ukraine, but according to United Nations estimates almost 730,000 people have now left Ukraine and moved to Russia this year because of the war in the east of the country. Some 87 per cent of the forced migrants are from the Lugansk and Donetsk regions. The Ukraine government is bombing and shooting at its own people who feel they will only be safe in Russia.

At the beginning of June, the number of refugees coming to Russia from eastern Ukraine was 2,600. By August 1, that total had increased to 102,600 people. Russia’s Federal Migration Service says that there are currently about two million Ukrainians in Russia, of whom 600,000 are from south-eastern Ukraine and 36,000 are living in temporary accommodation.

The mounting attacks on Putin make no reference to the centuries old historical links between Ukraine and Russia and the fact that Kiev is one of the cradles of the Russian nation. Nor do these attackers recognise the fact of a Russian-speaking minority living in the eastern Ukraine who have been subject to discrimination and attacks by the non-elected Kiev regime, comprising extreme nationalist and fascist elements.

A Western consensus depicting Putin as an imperialist, land-grabbing dictator is a concerted attempt to demonise Russia once more and return to the cold war cliches. 

The governments of the former Soviet republics are, with the exception of Belarus, extremely hostile to Russia, an attitude born out of historical circumstances. However, this hostility is being cynically played upon and fanned by the West. The choice of the Polish ex-prime minister Donald Tusk as the new EU president of the European Council is also significant. He is an avid Russophobe and aggressively pro-EU . 

Western consensus depicting Putin as an imperialist, land-grabbing dictator is fallacious and dangerous. He nor the Russian government or its people have any designs on the former republics. This is a completely concocted justification for supporting the illegitimate Ukrainian regime and to frighten the other former Soviet republics into joining the ongoing war. There is no evidence whatsoever for such allegations. Apart from anything else the Russian government would hardly be so stupid as to wish to once more conquer the countries which so recently won their independence and whose populations are largely hostile to Russia.

Putin is the elected leader of a democratic country, even if that democracy is flawed and elections are not completely free and transparent. NATO has been expanding inexorably eastwards, despite clear assurances given by Bush to Gorbachev not to do so, and hostility to Russia is being actively encouraged and even fomented by the US. The West encouraged the overthrow of a legitimate Ukrainian government, however corrupt, and has welcomed the new one, installed on the back of an armed coup. Putin and the Russian government have been remarkably restrained vis a vis the escalation in Ukraine and western threats and draconian trade boycott. NATO’s very recent decision to set up ‘rapid response units’ to deal with the so-called Russian aggression will only make a war between Russia, the US and Europe more likely and less difficult to prevent. 

The Rat Race is for Rats!

Ask anyone in work today whether they enjoy it and you won’t find many who reply: ‘yes, it’s great fun and rewarding’. Enormous numbers of people find their work stressful, pressurised, certainly not much fun and often poorly paid. Of course, for generations, work, particularly hard manual labour or monotonous office drudgery was never much fun either. For past generations, though, a sense of comradeship often bound workforces together; while work was hard and hours long, there was still time and opportunity for banter with colleagues and work mates, there was even room for creativity, innovation and individual input. That feeling alone of being part of a substantial workforce, of building or making things together or providing a vital public service gave many workers a sense of dignity and worth. 

The work process today has been rationalised, intensified and the opportunities for individual input largely eradicated. Robots don’t deviate from the commands given them nor do they fall ill, take holidays and maternity leave. For employers, if they can turn their workforce into quasi robots, so much the better, and that’s what most employers today are trying to do. Look at Amazon’s warehouses for a prime example. Every minute of the working day workers’ movements are tracked, time taken for each task measured and behaviour monitored, so that every single minute is accounted for. No time for a chat with a workmate, a short tea break or a quick scan of the newspaper on the toilet. These employment practices dehumanise the workforce and demonstrate how employers see their workers as units, as robots. There is no dignity here, no job satisfaction and certainly no joy. 

Workplace stress has become the defining factor for many workers with serious implications for mental and physical health and family life. A major study whose results were published this month by the Institute of Epidemiology in Munich, followed 5,337 men and women aged between 29 and 66 who were in full-time work.

It found that those under the most strain at work are 45 per cent more likely to fall ill, with increased risk of heart disease, strokes, blindness and amputations.

Stress at work 'raises diabetes risk by 45%. One in five are affected by high levels of stress at work, and raised levels of stress hormones upset the body’s glucose levels, which can damage the body's circulation and major organs

The study also found that those under the most strain at work are 45 per cent more likely to fall ill with the condition, which increases the risk of heart disease, strokes, blindness  and amputations, and strain is a factor even among the slim.

Some three million people in the UK are currently affected by diabetic symptoms, but if trends continue this could rise to four million by 2025 and five million by 2030, with type 2 accounting for 90 per cent of cases.

Marx memorably described the alienation that capitalism imposes on workers, by robbing them of a meaningful relationship with the products they make, but even he could hardly have envisaged  the cruel and ruthless perfection of the present system. Over thirty years ago, Jimmy Reid, one of the leaders of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in, memorably remarked that ‘the rate race is for rats, not human beings’. But that rat race is not even a race anymore, but a cage fight with a pre-determined outcome. 

Capitalism has always involved the alienation of working people because they are robbed of control over their working day and the work process itself. But the same transformation has since been imposed on the public sector too. While this sector was often characterised by lower pay than in the private one, that was compensated somewhat by higher job satisfaction. Public service workers were rewarded by seeing how their work helped and supported thier fellow citizens and there was also a highly motivating public service ethos and sense of social purpose. All this has been eroded, dismissed and ridiculed by successive Blairite and Tory governments which have portrayed such services as bloated, inefficient and second-rate. So that today we have a totally demoralised workforce in most areas of public service.

Work is at the centre of our lives, it largely determines who we are and what we are. Work denotes our place in society, we obtain satisfaction from contributing to society. Those without work suffer even deeper depression, a sense of being worthless and a loss of self esteem; we need work, just as we need food and drink. The workplace should be where we can express ourselves creatively, where we find companionship among like-minded people and where we readily devote our energies. It should also be a place of happiness. Under capitalism all that is impossible, where workers are seen merely as a means of profitable exploitation. Working people are, for the capitalist, merely a means to an end - to make more money.

END

From Hope to despair- why the Soviet Union collapsed

Many books and articles have been written about perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union together with actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe, but we have heard little from those who were actually involved in the process and are critical of how the process was handled. Hans Modrow was the last prime minister of the German Democratic Republic before free elections were held in 1990, leading to German unification. He was intimately involved in discussions with Gorbachev and other leading Soviet politicians, as well as with West German leaders in the run up to Germany unification.

His reminiscences offer a unique insight into the processes that brought about perestroika and the demise of Eastern Europe’s experiment with socialism. As soon as I had read only a few pages, I was fascinated and hooked. His book is an essential read for all those wishing to better understand those processes from the viewpoint of an intelligent insider and perceptive observer. It was written in 1998 but now, at last, translated into English.

Hans Modrow, the author of this book, was drafted as a 17-year-old into Hitler’s army and became a Soviet prisoner of war. After his release he, like many others traumatised by the Nazi experience, decided to help build a better, democratic post-war Germany. He became active in the FDJ socialist youth movement, and soon thereafter rose through the party ranks of the Socialist Unity Party in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to become its regional secretary in Dresden. By the eighties, he had already become disillusioned with the undemocratic practices of the SED and its leadership and began advocating the need for transformation to a proper democratic form of socialism. 

Unlike many others who once called themselves ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’, Modrow refused to cross to the other side and join the victors, nor has he succumbed to cynicism as many also did. He became an MP for the PDS (the party that emerged out of the SED, later to become Die Linke - the Left Party of Germany) in the Bundestag, and then an MEP. Today, he is honorary Chair of Die Linke and is still an active participant in the political life of Germany and maintains his international contacts.

Like Modrow and many others, I was initially full of admiration for Gorbachev when he took over the helm of the Soviet Communist Party. I knew that socialism in Eastern Europe and particularly in the Soviet Union had become ossified and that its progress was being held back by an inflexible bureaucracy. His original demands of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency) appeared to offer a way out of the quicksands. He was also unlike his stone-faced and apparatchik-like predecessors; he went out and mixed with the people, he was spontaneous, a great communicator and he was passionate about world peace. From that initial period, when he was seen as a man promising to usher in genuine socialist renewal,he became transformed into a darling of the west and, once he’d served his political purpose, ends up as an advertising ikon for a pizza chain.

Modrow reveals how Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership had no real concept about what they wanted or hoped for from perestroika and glasnost; they broke over the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc like a thunderstorm, but the crops they were supposed to nurture were left flattened in the fields.

Michail Gorbachev brought about not only the transformation of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, but the constellation of world relationships. At the centre of those profound changes that shook Europe was a divided Germany. Western leaders like Reagan, then Bush, Thatcher and Kohl couldn’t believe their luck when fairy godmother Gorbachev appeared to grant all their wishes without asking for a single quid pro quo.

The Pentagon generals must have polished their missiles with renewed vigour when they heard that Gorbachev wasn’t even demanding a written agreement that no NATO expansion eastwards would take place. He also ignored East German pleas to ensure that the post-war settlement, including the transfer of land from the big landowners to the people was sacrosanct, nor did he demand immunity of prosecution for GDR party leaders who had committed no crimes according to GDR law.

During his period as Dresden regional party secretary, Modrow had numerous contacts with the Soviet Union and other East European countries, and during his short time as prime minister he met frequently with Soviet leaders. He has an intimate knowledge of the processes that led to perestroika and the detailed discussion that took place between world leaders at that time. He was particularly involved in the discussions concerning the process that concluded with German unification. He explains how he fought for a unification on the basis of two internationally recognised German states coming together as equals. But what happened was the virtual annexation of the GDR by the Federal Republic. All the achievements of the GDR, such as- an exemplary social welfare system, the promotion of women in the workplace, universal childcare and a simplified, easily accessible justice system were all swept aside and a West German system imposed. But he is not someone who holds on to illusions: as he makes clear in his book, he believes that the centralised ‘command economies’ of Eastern Europe were doomed virtually from the outset because democratic principles were ignored. That’s why, today, he is an adamant supporter and campaigner for a genuinely democratic socialism.

The book is sometimes heavy with detail on the protracted negotiations, and many of the names of Soviet and East European leaders will be unfamiliar to British readers, but this shouldn’t put you off, as the unique analysis he provides is profoundly informative, fascinating and fact-based.

What is particularly interesting in Modrow’s account is that it is written by a man who still believes in socialism and refuses to call it a day. Unlike many others who once called themselves ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’, Modrow refused to cross to the other side and join the victors, nor has he succumbed to cynicism. 

Perestroika and Germany - the Truth behind the Myths by Hans Modrow, assisted by Bruno Mahlow.

Pbck. £10

Available from Marx memorial Library