Instrumentalization of Antisemitism in order to stop the Calls for Peace in Europe
Instrumentalization of Antisemitism in order to stop the Calls for Peace in Europe
Dortmund, a German city with deep ties to the arms industry and a concentration camp, accuses a peace activist of Anti-Semitism
In the City of Dortmund, a former center of steel production in Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr-area, politicians have resorted to calling Swiss peace researcher and Historian Daniele Ganser antisemitic. The allegation itself might well have been a case of antisemitic Propaganda. Thus it seems remarkable that Dortmund — a City which on April 20th 1933 (!) granted Freedoms of the City to Adolf Hitler due to the intimate ties to leading Nazi Sympathizers within the Steel- and Arms-Industries, and which also had a subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp to exploit Holocaust Victims for Slave Labor in the War-Production, would try to prevent a voice for peace from being expressed.
The Facts
Ganser, whose talks about the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) attract a growing number of people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, was due to speak in Dortmund on March 27. In his speeches he addresses the MIC’s hunger for war and the repetition of lies which are needed to enter into those wars before they get exposed, only to be followed by the next lies for the next war. The Ukraine being a case in point for Ganser, it is obvious how the political establishment in Germany is becoming more and more uneasy about thousands of people finding their way to Ganser’s talks. He exposes the many conflicts of interests and inconsistencies in official narratives about a war which brings Europe and the World to the brink of a nuclear conflict.
Clearly Ganser, whose presentation style is calm, rational and modest, is able to appeal to a wide spectrum of audiences, including more and more middle class people who understand that the official media is not reporting the true story. As such, Ganser is a threat to the Establishment, politicians and the media who go along with the NATO/MIC-agenda.
Weaponizing Anti-Semitism
On February 9, 2023, the City Council of Dortmund decided in a majority vote to not allow Ganser into municipal arenas such as Westfalenhalle. In a drafted motion to ban Ganser all parties represented in the City Council — with the exception of the AfD Party — accused Ganser of being a “Conspiracy ideologist/ Conspiracy Theorist” who,
“among other things, in the film ‘Pandamned’ from 2022 compares the separation of ‘vaccinated’ and ‘unvaccinated’ persons [during the Covid Pandemic] with the persecution of Jews during National Socialism.”
Such statements, the City Council asserted,
“are clearly to be classified as anti-Semitic and historically revisionist, since they relativize the Shoah and trivialize the murderous anti-Semitism of National Socialism as a supposed ‘split in the population’, (…)”
For anyone watching the respective passage (translated/subtitled version here) it is obvious that what Ganser said was not a trivialization of the Shoa, nor one of the anti-Semitism of Nazis. On the contrary, Ganser pointed out how during Covid governments around the world had been taking part in madness. Whilst 80 years ago there had been safe havens elsewhere in the world where those who were persecuted (then Jews) could find refuge, it is practically impossible for people to escape the current “global coup d’etat”.
The discrimination between vaccinated and unvaccinated persons is indeed, as has been shown by the documentary “Never Again Is Now Global” a parallel to how the totalitarian regime of the Nazis started. Holocaust Survivor Marian Turski, also, made the point that “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky” but rather progressed gradually with incremental steps. Therefore, he emphasized that it is incumbent on a democratic society to oppose infringements of basic rights of minorities, Turski said in his speech at Auschwitz on January 27, 2020. That is exactly the point Ganser stressed in the passage that was mis-used to serve a political purpose in Dortmund’s City Council on February 9 of this year.
Antisemitic Propaganda as a means of gaining political support.
What the City Council of Dortmund obviously did in their attempt to keep Daniele Ganser from speaking at Westfalenhalle was a thinly disguised veil for an appeal for support for cancelling one of very few critics of the escalating Russian/Ukrainian/NATO-conflict. After almost a year of war propaganda on mainstream media, Ganser is more popular than ever before. Consequently, a heavy-handed approach was used to cut off support for him. However, such approaches backfire on the political actors. Slandering opponents (of a war campaign) as “antisemites or Nazis to diminish their reputations with specific audiences” is itself a feature of anti-Semitic Propaganda as it constitutes, according to the Anti Defamation League (ADL), “a conscious choice of instrumentalizing (…) antisemitism for political gain.”
Unlike Dortmund’s city politicians the ADL is well aware that using anti-Semitism as an allegation against people or organizations without justification is “not helpful to the fight against anti-Semitism”.
Political scheming ?
What makes things look bad for Ganser is of course the unfortunate fact that only the AfD party is coming to his defense. Not only does it mean that the Swiss historian faces a wide range of political adversaries. Far more problematic is the defense of AfD (to which Ganser lacks any apparent connection). Why? Because it is a party with some troublesome history of what the ADL calls “Holocaust Fatigue”. Several leading proponents of AfD-leadership (all of which were involved in ousting the founding leaders of what was a middle-class protest movement against questionable financial policies in connection with the Bail-Out of Banks and States such as Greece between 2009-2014). After a sweeping success on the platform of sound fiscal policies the party was taken over by more right-leaning “rebels”, some of which have since expressed views of “Hitler and Nazis (being) mere bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German History” which was “longer than the damn 12 years”. Others have criticised Berlin for erecting a “Monument of Shame right in its center”, words spoken in the context of “war crimes” committed by the Allies in WWII, thus establishing a connection to the Holocaust Memorial Monument off Tiergarten, right next to the Brandenburg Gate.
Ganser is unwillingly put into the context of Guilt-by-Association. Two things are worth noting with respect to this dilemma: First, even whilst the AfD party does have an obligation to clarify its position regarding questionable as well as inappropriate instances of true Relativization of the German Nazi past, many members of the original platform remain who have not shown sympathy or even consent to those quotes by the AfD Leadership. Second, and most important, it remains to be seen whether or not AfD is different from its German predecessor, NPD (National Party of Germany), which was the melting pot of Neo-Nazis in Germany prior to the rise of AfD.
What made the NPD a very dubious organization — and what remains to be seen with regard to the AfD — has been documented and successful attempts of the German Intelligence Community, i.e. the German Federal Republic, to infiltrate and dominate the NPD, prompted the Federal Constitutional Court to declare a mistrial and to refuse to abolish the NPD as unconstitutional in 2003, as was sought by the German Government. Why did the Court refuse? Because it saw the state behind an organization which it sought to abolish, which is absurd. This raises serious questions as to the possible instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by not just one city in Germany.