An Anti-German’s Guide to Germany II

I don’t know whether I’ll manage to keep up the rhythm of good things about Germany – bad things about Germany as there is so much more in the second category. But so far it works.

This time I’ll introduce a musical subculture which – while also harboring a majority of extreme sexists and thorough fascists – is one of the few scenes that features Anti-Germans. (Something about Anti-German Hip Hop coming up in another posting.) I’m talking about Breakcore and its huge variety of subgenres.

It’s pretty safe to say that the Anti-German contributions to the scene are among the most creative ones, that is, the ones with the most ecclecticistic approach to styles and samples as well as the ones most enjoyable for dancing (if you want to free the epileptic within you…)

Let’s begin with Lfo Demon who can be found on myspace and last.fm with dancefloor anthems like “Classwar Dynamite” or “The Skinhead broke my telephone”, culture clashs like “California unter alles”, as well as programmatic Hip Hop remixes like 5 3 9’s “Antideutsche Welle” (= “Anti-German wave” as a reaction the “Neue Deutsche Welle” recently proclaimed for the second time by nationalist rapper Fler). He’s also written a couple of texts about politics (“Fuck Old Europe”), the culture industry and the German beer tents.

Even more explicitly Anti-German already by name is Krautkillah Soundsystem who organized benefit gigs for the Anti-German weekly Jungle World. Though most of their stuff is quite incomprehensible for a Non-German as it’s using German vocal samples I can tell you it works as a giant relief for me. Unfortunately I can only link to the myspace-page of one of their DJs, Monty Cantsin who’s featuring the song “Krautkillah” loosely based on the track “Killah” by The Bug.

More outstanding Breakcore artists can be seen not as precisely Anti-German but as in several ways like-minded. I’ll just mention Istari Lasterfahrer of Sozalistischer Plattenbau who recorded Raggacore tracks against homophobia (“Me the faggot they are shot”, “To the battyman massive”) and the first breakcore track to positively feature GWB (“Angela Merkel 220 bpm”), the almighty Karl Marx Stadt and his Society Suckers of Resonance FM fame (listen to what he did to Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and the sheer mind-boggling ecstasy on “All I wanna do”), finally Cologne based band Bam Bam Babylon Bajasch who parody ragga clone style, f. e. in “One Love” where they sing about religious belief in general and about christian and rastafarian belief especially: “One Love, One Heap of Shit, sugarcoatin’ your hatred”.

(first posted at the Trots’)

An Anti-German’s Guide to Germany I

Among the many devastating ideologies that originated in Germany one has only recently been identified, isolated and traced back to its source. Conspirationism, the ideological escalation of conspiracy theories took the major steps to its modern form among German aristocrats and nationalists.

Step one: In the 1780s, German bureaucrats and religious censors started attributing all the evils of “Frenchism”, that is, of the eruptions of absolutist and feudal order to a secret society called the Illuminati which had existed for a short period of time mostly among teachers and noblemen in Bavaria and Northern Germany. Soon after the French Revolution, a whole movement of counter-revolutionaries devoted themselves to the proof that there was a direct historical line from Satan to the Illuminati. They gained some influence with their “Wiener Zeitschrift” which became one of the major inspirations for the first modern conspirationism classic by the French cleric Auguste Barruel.

Step two: As a reaction to the more substantial threat German aristocracy faced in the revolution of 1848, noble stateservants of Prussia painted an even bigger picture than that of the bourgeois Illuminati trying to shake Absolutism. This time, they expanded the plot geographically and socially by accusing the British trading bourgeoisie of organizing a European workers’ revolt in order to destroy the entire social fabric of the continent, thus rendering it a cheap and easy to control market for Britain. Prussia actually sent agents to London to gather information about the democratic exilants there and put a couple their comrades to prison in 1850’s “Kommunistenprozeß” (Trial against Communists) in Cologne. Prussian arictocracy succeeded in convincing the King and most Germans of the sinister threat to their and every society against which only the incorruptible nobles could form any resistance. The military stayed in the hands of the reactionary aristocracy imprinting romantic nationalism, strict obedience and conspirationism into several generations of army recruits. German military became “the school of the nation”, as a popular proverb said. As both bourgeoisie and working class had been successfully accused of fraternazation with the enemy, both classes were from that time on seen as divided – consisting of a loyal and an illoyal fraction.

Step three: After 1871’s triumph over France which gave such a bad example to the world – especially to Japan – war time and post-war accumulation resulted in a short, but significant economical crisis which could hardly be blamed on foreign powers, even by conspirationists. This became not only the “Gründerzeit”, the founding epoch of Germany as a nation, but also of modern antisemitism as we unfortunaltely still know it today. Into the already established concept of a world-wide sinister plot using all the modern social classes against traditional society, German conspirationists introduced the Jews as the driving force behind the global conspiracy. The illoyal parts of the classes were now simply the Jewish workers and bourgeois, inciting revolts and spreading cultural decadence. Modern antisemitism couldn’t have developed its form without the previous establishment of a conspirationist concept.

As most readers of this blog probably know, the “International Jewish Conspiracy” became the core issue of the Nazis – and it’s safe to say it had been a core issue of many Germans already before. As antisemitism was outlawed after WWII and could only be expressed in less obvious forms as anti-zionism, we can’t properly tell how heavily German society is still influenced by conspirationism. But many modern day popular issues indicate a strong tradition. Whenever it’s about Israel, about foreign economic power (referred to in mass media and by leading politicians as “locusts”), about threats to “social peace” (the obedience of the loyal classes) you see conspirationism shining through.

I’ll give you some examples in upcoming postings as I’m coming across them all the time. I’m going to start translating my current book on the issue into English and have a separate blog for that purpose. If anybody can offer assistance I’d be glad about it.

(first posted at the Trots’)

‘Meet the Anti-Germans’

>>During the World Cup, the Anti-Germans had a hard time as millions of ordinary Germans decorated their balconies in red, gold and black flags; even German dogs wore patriotic colours. At this month’s pro-Israeli demo, the Anti-Germans did get to wave a flag, however. The American one. Do they ever have any fun? “We don’t have much fun,” Dahlmann concedes. “But we are not ascetics. We drink beer and wine”.<<
Luke Harding, Guardian

Finally, somebody does compare Bush with the Nazis

>>Let’s imagine what our world would look like if George W. Bush really were a Nazi.

First, to the foreign policy:

* Guantanamo Bay would, of course, exist. However, it would be receiving constant new shipments of people, because the initial residents would all long since be dead — worked and starved to death, and then incinerated in crematoria or dumped in mass graves. Of course, no journalist or lawyer would be allowed on the premises. Except those who had criticized the Administration, and they would last no longer than the other prisoners.
* The new inmates from Guantanamo Bay — and the dozens of other camps like it — would have been swept up during raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in the United States. If they offered the slightest resistance, they would be shot on the spot. Once they were packed off into the transport planes, nobody would ever hear of them again. Their families would receive a postcard a few months later saying they “died in a work accident.”
* Iraq and Afghanistan would be filled with large factories producing consumer goods and materiel for the American war effort. The workers would live in secure camps next to the factories, would work 12-15 hours a day for no wages, and would receive food rations well below what they required to stay in good health. I don’t even need to mention that the oil would be shipped directly to the United States, and anyone who questioned why Iraqis were not being paid for it would be sent immediately to Guantanamo, if not simply executedon the spot.
* To deter insurgent attacks, the U.S. military would round up 50-100 civilians who lived near the site of any attack, line them up against a wall, shoot them. Their bodies would be allowed to rot in the sun for a few days to bring the message home, and then the U.S. military would announce the action and its justification in printed Arabic posters all over the city.

Now, to domestic affairs:

* Bush would be the unquestioned and absolute leader of the United States. There might still be a U.S. Congress, but it would be no more than a rubber-stamp, and a shift in power would be inconceivable. Bush would have a ruling philosophy called, let’s say, Bushism. Under this philosophy, persons of Arab descent would be viewed as inferior and harmful to the human race. They would be locked away in ghettos just outside major U.S. cities; anyone who left the ghetto without authorization would be shot on sight by government guards. Their property, jobs, and all civil rights would be stripped of them. Eventually, all of them, without a single exception, would be shipped to death factories and incinerated. As at Auschwitz, the crematoria would be so busy that their chimneys would have to be regularly unclogged of human fat deposits.
* There would be no Democratic Party. It would be an illegal organization, and most of its leaders would be long dead. There would only be the Bush Republican Party. Anyone who sought serious career advancement would have to join it. The press, the military, the economic elite, writers, the legal profession, and even the medical profession would all be required to accept basic principles of Bushism. Although prominent professionals might have some leeway to timidly criticize the party line or refuse to take part in discrimination, most would not have this option. If they openly criticized Bush, they would at a minimum lose their jobs, and might well be shipped off to Guantanamo or some similar place, never to be heard from again.
* Any media outlet that criticized Bush’s policies would promptly be shut down by a large, shadowy domestic security agency. Their presses and servers would be confiscated and destroyed by the government, and their editors shipped off to Guantanamo, probably after a brief show trial in which they confessed that they were traitors or spies who deserved nothing better. The public confessions would be secured by torture and threats against their remaining family members.<< (German Joys)

Hisphemy

>>The mythology states, in effect, that there is no history but Arab history. There is no history but Muslim history. Zionism (and Zionism is what he is talking about here) is an alien force. A bizarre, demiurgical act of violence against the natural development of human events. I must emphasize the artificiality of this mythos. History is not natural. That is, the very idea of history as a natural development, operating under reasonable and autonomous rules, is itself a human creation.<<
“The Ghetto of History” by The Anti-Chomskyite.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Spain

Just don’t do it. Really. You’re only gonna end up shouting at seemingly deaf drivers and cursing every single Spanish person as probably all of them will have passed you by once you’ve made it through the country. Which is probably only gonna happen with lots of patience or with the help of public transport and foreign drivers.

And don’t start complaining unless you know their language for they know only Spanish. Anyway, debates will soon have to touch the question for the general mindset and most likely they will do the rest of the excluding job by that.

Let it be. Skip it, press fast foward, and enjoy the neighbouring countries which by comparison look even more amazing. After a number of days of Spanish deprivation, hitchhiking in Portugal or France will turn you on again: people who talk to you, drivers who stop to take you to a good spot or who stop at all.