The reinterpretation of some classical concepts - Orwellian - is taking place at an ever faster pace in Germany. Neokohn has already reported . The other day, the German cultural elite managed not only to expand the concept of Nazi-related racism, but also to put it in a completely new light.
This happened at the Berlin House of Cultures symposium entitled "Hijacking memory - the Holocaust and the new right-wing", the most important message of which was that commemorating the Holocaust is indeed a symptom and breeding ground of racism and right-wing radicalism. The debate, which has now been raised to the state level - the House of Cultures is a state institution supported by taxes - began about a year ago, when
the self-proclaimed historian Dirk Moses, a supporter of the BDS movement, demanded an end to the Shoah commemorations, as they legitimize Israel's colonial policy.
This idea was intended to be deepened by the symposium that was just organized.
The House of Culture is one of the supporters of the petition in which artists and people active in the field of culture protested against the condemnation of the BDS movement by the German parliament in 2019. The initiative of the symposium goes back to the petition, more precisely to the person of the American Jewish anti-Semite Susan Neiman, who is the director of the Einstein-Forum in Potsdam, which is also supported by taxes.
Neiman was an adviser to Obama at the time, and has already emerged as a critic of German support for Israel and German commemoration culture. The anti-Semitism research center of the Technical University of Berlin assisted in the arrangement (also courtesy of the taxpayer).
So it is a completely state event.
The participants in the program wanted to investigate how Holocaust commemorations are used by the political right - they took it for granted that this is so.
Neiman rejected all criticism of the event as mere slander, just as only slanderers dared to accuse Dokumenta, which will open
According to Neiman's thesis, since 1945, a victim cult has been established in Germany, which logically led to the political right using the Holocaust as a tool for its own purposes.
From this hair-raising explanation, it is certainly true that the German New Left, especially the representatives of the 68 movement, continued the pre-war left-wing tradition under the pretext of supporting the oppressed peoples, and were passionately pro-Arab and did not hide their anti-Semitic Israel-hating tendencies.
In this they could definitely count on the support of the Soviet Union and the communist camp. Many members of the notorious Bader-Meinhof terrorist group were trained in Arab terrorist training camps for their domestic activities. And it is certainly true that if repentance really existed in Germany, it was mostly found among those with conservative, Christian convictions.
According to Neiman and the participants of the conference, commemorating the SOA is an elite project aimed at covering up the German colonial policy, which is why the culture of remembrance is a tool of racist oppression.
Zionism is understood as a fascist movement with only one goal: to oppress the "Palestinians" and the left. Therefore, the anti-fascist declarations of the right-wing should not be taken seriously, in fact, the right-wing's support for Israel is only a cloak that masks the real, right-wing anti-Semitism. It is definitely worth mentioning that the 1968 revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit, also of Jewish origin, also participated in the conference, without contradicting this disgusting theory.
The conference was consciously connected to the conflict created in the case of Documenta, which opened in Kassel on June 18, and the accusation of anti-Semitic orientation voiced by many. Documenta is one of the largest international exhibitions of contemporary visual art, whose artistic director this year is a predominantly Muslim Indonesian group close to the anti-Israel boycott movement.
Together with the German authorities, the "artistic management" took care to keep Israeli artists away, which is considered a tradition in the history of Documenta, but among the invited are well-known Arab and Muslim anti-Semites and supporters of Arab terrorism and the BDS movement.
From the beginning, the German leaders of the exhibition, which was maintained solely by taxes (3.5 million euros from the federal cultural fund alone went to Documenta), blocked all criticism, which at first came mainly from Jewish organizations, but in the meantime many liberal intellectuals also joined them. A planned public discussion was canceled by the management citing that some people should see the exhibition before protesting - which, of course, does not change the banning of Israeli artists.
Christian Geselle, the mayor of the city of Kassel and the chairman of the Documenta board, argued the same way, saying that "first, let's see what the 15th Documenta is about and then judge, and not let the discussion in the media stir up worries and fears."
In other words, the concerns expressed by Jewish organizations are only "excited" fears, which is why it is completely unnecessary to take them seriously or to provide them with a public forum.
According to the mayor, anti-Semitism also belongs to "artistic freedom", and then he stated with barely understandable confusion that the positions appearing at Documenta "may be difficult to follow or unbearable based on our German identity", but of course we have to tolerate all this in the sense of diversity.
In the so-called "quality media" there is an almost unanimous opinion that the problem is solely the hysteria of Jewish organizations. Hans Eichel, a social democrat who started his career as the mayor of Kassel and took it all the way to the Ministry of Finance, and whose opinion still carries a lot of weight in the Latvian newspaper, made a statement in this sense in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, called by many "alpine pravda".
Only a few spoke in the same sense as the renowned Berlin gallery owner Aeneas Bastian:
"The misdirection of Documenta proves that those with an anti-Semitic mindset try to take advantage of every forum. Artistic freedom has its limits, and they were crossed in Kassel a long time ago".
It is clear which side the left-green participants of the conference quoted at the beginning are on in this conflict. So is why it is necessary to identify Shoah commemoration with right-wing racism:
This interpretation best corresponds to the current German reality.
Photo: Getty Images
