Having just seen the latest exercise in neocon academic grandstanding, a widely publicized letter to "German colleagues" by defenders of the US war against terror, I am driven ineluctably to the following observation. Although the reasoning offered by the Red-Green coalition government in Germany for not contributing to a US attack on Iraq is both tortured and masochistic (what else should one expect from a pc Teutonic regime?), the conclusion to which it comes is thoroughly defensible. Note the conservative German weekly for which I write, Junge Freiheit, embraces the same conclusion, albeit for correct reasons, namely it is not in the interest of European nations to join in American imperialist aggression against a regionalist Middle Eastern power, particularly one that does not pose a credible threat to either the US or Germany. If either country objects to Muslim terrorists, it does have the option, although a politically incorrect one, of suspending or restricting immigration.
Equally to the point, and contrary to a flat assertion made by the Fox Network loudmouth Bill O' Reilly (New York Post, August 8, 2002) Germans do not "owe" the American government to the point of being obligated to put themselves at risk in a neocon-fomented war against Iraq. O'Reilly repeats the fiction that the US "rebuilt" Germany after lots of devastation just happened to occur there. In fact the Germans rebuilt their own country, thanks to patriotic classical liberals like Ludwig Erhard, despite the fact the US, like the other occupying powers, set out to treat postwar Germany vindictively. Erhard worked around the American administrators, who enforced price-and-wage controls and in some cases deliberately injured Germany's postwar recovery attempts, to create something like a free-market economy. He succeeded in doing so because of American inattention and because Erhard enjoyed deserved prestige as an anti-Nazi, although one who was equally a friend of freedom.
As for why Germany needed rebuilding, the U.S. and Britain did play critical roles here, by turning the country into a junkyard. They engaged in the later stages of the war in relentless saturation bombing of civilian populations, well beyond arguable military targets. As a result, large parts of almost all major German cities were destroyed, while Dresden, an overcrowded refugee and Red Cross center by the end of the war, almost disappeared from the map because of British bombing. Making this point is not to excuse Nazi brutality or Nazi conquests. It is simply to underline the obvious truth, that the relation of the Western "democracies" to Germany has not been a predominantly benevolent one, from at least the starvation blockade and the Treaty of Versailles onward. And the fact that we got nice to the Germans (when we needed them) during the Cold War does not negate the mutually unkind relations that preceded that turn.
Ironically, the sense that Germany is a moral pariah, which now fuels German pacifism, was also a gift of the American presence in Central Europe. Postwar American "re-educators" in Germany, with the assistance of the occupation government, undertook to help Germans "overcome the past," by filling their heads with negative thoughts about their entire national history. Nazism and Auschwitz were presented as the necessary culmination of a wicked collective past, which abounded in militarism and lacked the democratic spirit. If the fruits of this Umerziehung can now be seen in Chancellor Schroeder's statements about how a repentant Germany is committed to abstinence from military force and to justice for the Third World, one must conclude that he has learned well from his American re-educators and their German assistants.
Attacking him, as neocons have begun to do, as an enemy of global democracy, is profoundly dishonest. Schroeder and his leftist pals are following the Teutonophobic script that American and German journalists, including neocon ones, expected his contrite (but never quite contrite enough) country to follow, until now. Schroeder wishes to keep Germans away from military operations, given their collective predisposition for mass murder, the way one tries to prevent alcoholics from smelling booze. Old habits can come back, with catastrophic results. Little did Schroeder know that by turning his back on the putative German past, he would soon be accused of doing exactly the opposite, showing the habitual German contempt for "democracy," as defined in the offices of the Weekly Standardand National Review.
Pilger and Laughland, a favorite Australian and Englishman of mine, have given the reasons why no self-respecting European patriot would want anything to do with the American empire. As an American, however, I find the problem to be even worse. We are running after neocon journalists, who try to compensate for the facts that they are physically puny and don't personally bear the hardships of their Middle-Eastern commitments, by pushing the US into bloodbaths. Even scarier, these militarists of the pen are getting away with this exercise in psychological compensation — and may be propelling the US into a war that we should not be fighting. At the very least, the Germans and the other Europeans would do well to stay out of it.