Nationalist Myths and Modern Media: Contested Identities in the Age of Globalization 9780755619863, 9781845110383

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MYTHS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM An Introduction Edward Timms

The theme of this book is the enduring power of myths in an age of global communications. When that notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was concocted by the Tsarist secret police around 1900, it was designed to impress arrogant aristocrats and credulous peasants. Although the forgery was exposed in the early 1920s, it remained influential in the period between the two world wars, helping to inspire Hitler’s genocidal hatred of Jews. The defeat of Nazi Germany failed to discredit the myth for those who picture the world in terms of an apocalyptic conflict between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Despite the achievements of social reconstruction and economic integration since 1945, such myths retain their hold in the new millennium. The message that the world is threatened by some ‘axis of evil’, once furtively peddled on the political fringe, is now being promoted by mainstream politicians and disseminated through the Internet. In short, cataclysmic myths are being promoted by sophisticated modern media. Our primary focus is on the period since 1990, highlighting developments since the ending of the Cold War, the unification of Germany and the emergence of new forms of xenophobia. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the grip of the Kremlin appeared to herald a new era of international reconciliation, with blooming landscapes replacing the blighted territories of the past. The ascendancy of liberal capitalism, backed by new technologies of global communication and military power, prompted predictions of the ‘end of ideology’. But by the autumn of 2003, when the contributors to this book gathered for an international conference in London, the picture had become more sombre. The attacks

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of 9/11 on the twin towers of the World Trade Center confirmed in the minds of western political leaders the emergence of a new enemy to replace the ‘red peril’ that had haunted the previous decades: militant Islam. American foreign policy entered a dynamic new phase with the invasion of Iraq, while Russia, too, opted for military force as the solution for the conflict with Chechnia. Radical Islamists began to demonize the United States for its global influence and its alliance with Israel, and with the emergence of China as an economic superpower the stage seems to be set for rivalries even more intense than those of the Cold War. Politics and the media In the opening paper Stephen Burman recalls the cyclical patterns of American foreign policy since 1945 with the balance shifting between isolation and intervention. Under President Clinton the conception of the United States as the sole superpower was not fully developed, but after 9/11 the neo-conservatives in George W. Bush’s administration resolved to establish American hegemony on an unprecedented scale. Aspirations of this magnitude, Burman argues, rely on myths to create a mentality that justifies them. The policy statements of the White House may be couched in realistic terms, but the underlying thinking is both messianic and Manichaean. Foreign policy is seen as a ‘struggle of good against evil’, and in this battle American policy is sanctioned by a higher authority, entitling it to override the sovereignty of other states. Americans believe they are fighting the good fight not simply for humanitarian reasons, but because they are fighting for their God, a ‘very peculiar form of Christian deity’. While cautioning against blanket condemnations of this strategy, Burman concludes that world affairs have become unbalanced by American pre-eminence, and he invokes the warning from Greek mythology that such ‘hubris’ invites retribution. It might, however, have been more apposite to recall the apocalyptic visions that inspire Christian fundamentalists on the American far right. The second paper, by Martin Durham, explores the historical roots of the American right. It is not only in Russia that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion found enthusiastic adherents, for the concept of a Jewish conspiracy was taken up by a wide range of right-wing propagandists in the United States, led by Henry Ford. The growth of federal government during the inter-war period became associated with an alleged extension of Jewish power, and Jews were seen as playing satanic roles in the unfolding of a ‘divinely directed drama’. The view of The Protocols as a ‘global master plan’ provided common ground for a variety of far-right groups, from

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the Christian Identity movement of the 1940s to the Patriot movement of the 1990s, while some of the most outspoken agitators combined antisemitism with anti-communism. What emerges from this paper is that ‘conspiracism’ forms a mind-set that is infinitely adaptable, regardless of whether the secret enemy to be defeated is communism or globalization, Jews, Freemasons or Illuminati. America’s global mission involves a combination of factors, ranging from religious revivalism to freedom of the press. The paper by James Miller examines the efforts made since the early 1990s to introduce western models of democratic journalism into Central Europe. Conventional media theory maintains that journalists should be ‘non-partisan intermediaries between citizens and their government’, owing primary allegiance to the ethical standards and craft skills of their field, not to their employers. Given the Communist model of state control, which subordinated reporting to ideological correctness, the task since the ending of the Cold War has been to provide media assistance for former Communist countries, ranging from the donation of equipment to the organization of workshops on media management. This programme of ‘democracy promotion’ was initiated by a range of organizations led by the National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the American government, and by Journet, a global network supported by UNESCO. In addition to the resources provided online, the Handbook for Journalists of Central and Eastern Europe, published in 1990 by the World Press Freedom Committee, sets out the principles of ‘normal’ journalism with an emphasis on the reporter’s ability to ‘dig out facts’. Miller argues that this set of ‘cookbooklike instructions’, with its ‘fetishizing of technique’, fails to acknowledge how historically troubled journalism has always been. It is an illusion that a journalist can be a ‘well-rewarded resident of society’s upper reaches and still stand apart from them’; and the claim that media assistance has played a leading role in bringing democracy to Eastern Europe has elements of a self-aggrandizing myth. Just how democratic the western media really are is the question explored in the following paper by John Theobald, which challenges optimistic conceptions of an ‘information society’ participating in shared processes of enlightenment. Building on the findings of a new generation of radical media critics, he suggests that affluent consumers addicted to e-mails and chatrooms are liable to ignore the worldwide realities of poverty and injustice. Starting with the paradigm provided around 1900 by the ‘godfather’ of media criticism, the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, he shows how a simple issue—the guilt or innocence of a man accused of

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murder—could become obscured by a highly charged debate, shaped in that case by the myth of ‘ritual murder’. Thus the media discourse around the event ‘eclipsed the event itself ’. This approach, Theobald argues, has applications for our own day, especially for the ‘war on terror’ and the demonization of Islam. The followers of Osama bin Laden are presented as the agents of a global conspiracy to take over the Christian world, while Osama, with his gaunt features and dark beard, is implicitly assimilated into the myth of the wandering Jew. Even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which prides itself on its independence, tends to endorse an anti-Islamic and pro-American line. A Panorama programme broadcast in October 2001, six weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, may in theory have adopted a ‘balanced’ approach; but Theobald’s close analysis suggests that it functioned as a ‘disguised propaganda exercise’. This judgement may seem unduly harsh to those who recall the conflicts between the BBC and the British government over the ‘dodgy dossier’ used by Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify support for the invasion of Iraq. The claim that Britain was in immediate danger of attack by ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was discredited during the ensuing debate, leaving Blair’s reputation severely tarnished. But a different set of questions arises when the focus shifts to home affairs, where the government’s aim has been to promote multiculturalism and co-operation with Europe. To what extent can these policies be sustained in the face of the hostility towards foreigners promoted by right-wing pressure groups and the popular press? The person best qualified to answer this question is Gerry Gable, veteran editor of Searchlight, the magazine that has monitored the activities of racist and fascist groups for the past thirty years. The picture painted by Gable, in a paper jointly authored with Chana Moshenska, shows that both the National Front and the British National Party operate in a grey area between politics and criminality. When they are not quarrelling among themselves, their leaders have a flair for fomenting localized ethnic conflicts, but they lack the sophistication that gives neo-nationalist movements in other countries their drive and direction. There is certainly a reservoir of negative emotions waiting to be tapped: latent antisemitism, a fear of large-scale immigration and a lingering suspicion of Europe. And there is electoral advantage in exploiting anti-European prejudices, as indicated by the success of the United Kingdom Independence Party in June 2004. But extremist groups are being contained by legislation against incitement to racial hatred and by more controversial measures to combat terrorism. In the longer term, the cry that the ‘British way of life is in

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danger’ may prove to be a hopeful sign, portending a modernized economy, a reinvigorated culture, perhaps even a more varied and healthy diet. The essentially negative stance of the far right in Britain is reflected in its support for Holocaust denial, analysed in the paper by Michael Whine. After a flurry of pamphlets, many of them emanating from the National Front and the British National Party, denouncing the Holocaust as a ‘hoax’, the campaign found a more formidable spokesman in the historian David Irving, whose high-profile activities provided cover for more extreme forms of Holocaust denial, such as the Leuchter Report. Exploiting the tradition of freedom of speech, British-based publishers also produced denial literature in other languages for dissemination abroad. Prosecutions in the British courts have succeeded in curbing the most racially abusive agitators, while Irving’s fallacies were spectacularly exposed in 2000 during his self-destructive libel action against Deborah Lipstadt. A more disturbing development is the alliance between the British far right and Islamic groups like the Society of Converts to Islam, which have initiated a new wave of Holocaust denial linked with conflicts in the Middle East. Their message, which echoes the arguments of European antisemites, is simple: ‘Destroy the Holocaust myth and you have destroyed Israel.’ Such denial propaganda has had only a limited impact in Britain, but the outpourings of antisemitic Internet sites are proving more difficult to contain. Racist agitators are unlikely to thrive in a stable democracy with a flourishing economy, efficient welfare services and legislation protecting ethnic minorities. However, liberal societies tend to attract both economic migrants and political refugees, prompting nationalists to claim that their country is being ‘swamped’ by foreigners. This issue places a premium on responsible reporting and the promotion of rational debate. Hence the special interest of ‘Strangers in Our Midst’, Bo Petersson’s study of the correspondence column of a Swedish local newspaper, Smålänningen. In small-town settings like Ljungby, the community studied here, the local newspaper holds a strong position, creating a discursive marketplace for its readers as well as being a crucial actor within it. Although little out of the ordinary occurred in Ljungby during 2002, events in other parts of Sweden, including the so-called ‘honour killing’ of a young Islamic woman, provoked a virulent debate in the correspondence columns. The impending general election gave the issue an additional urgency, with right-wingers stressing the burden that refugees placed on Swedish taxpayers. The government’s immigration policies, it was claimed, were far too liberal, and linguistic tests should be introduced before the granting of citizenship. Interviews with the staff of Smålänningen reveal that some of the letters

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received were so racist as to be unpublishable. The letters column revealed disturbing undercurrents even in this tranquil small-town setting, although more liberal readers responded with letters stressing that immigrants made a positive contribution to the Swedish economy. The result of the 2002 election was that the People’s Party made dramatic gains, doubtless due to their campaign for citizenship tests. After the Wall In Part Two, the focus switches to Germany and Austria. Where Sweden, like Britain and the United States, can define its identity in terms of an unbroken democratic tradition, this is by no means the case in Germany, a country in search of a usable past. It was in Germany that the conflicts of the Cold War came into sharpest focus, as the American-sponsored Federal Republic confronted the German Democratic Republic across the Berlin Wall. The founding of the two German states involved new forms of myth-making, as a dispirited people were taught to repudiate their Nazi past and accept military defeat as a welcome liberation. A gap opened between public modes of commemoration and the private memories of those who had been traumatized and bereaved. After protracted efforts to come to terms with the disasters of the past, the unification of the two states in 1990 inspired the hope that Germany could at last put its troubled history behind it and become a ‘normal’ European nation. This desire for normality is analysed in a searching overview by Franziska Augstein, a journalist who writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In foreign affairs, she shows that the ambitions of the German government, led first by Helmut Kohl and then by Gerhard Schröder, are constrained by the difficulty of acting independently of either the United States or the European Union. However, the refusal to support the invasion of Iraq can be seen as a sign of political maturity, suggesting that the citizens of the Federal Republic have learned from their own history. The situation in the domestic sphere is very different, since the debate about ‘Auschwitz’ remains unresolved. While the overcoming of National Socialism is widely regarded as the founding myth of the Federal Republic, minority groups of right-wing radicals are committed to neo-nationalist forms of commemoration. The position is complicated by the need to reassess the post-war division of Germany that was regarded in liberal circles as a ‘historical punishment’ for National Socialism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new historiography has emerged that tends to place the leftist totalitarianism of the German Democratic Republic on the same footing as National Socialism. According to this view, the Federal Republic

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has emerged victorious from two totalitarian systems. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that right-wing radicalism has become so widespread in East Germany, although mainstream politicians prefer not to make too much fuss about neo-Nazis, for fear of jeopardizing Germany’s international respectability, so assiduously regained. Augstein’s argument ends on a more positive note, concluding that in Germany today there is little risk of patriotism degenerating into nationalism. In the following paper on Germany’s New Right, Jan Herman Brinks reviews the revival of ideas deriving from the so-called ‘conservative revolutionaries’ of the Weimar Republic. Numerically, the authors of the New Right may appear insignificant, but politically their ideas, disseminated through a range of websites and periodicals, are proving surprisingly influential. Brinks analyses their core ideas, including ethno-pluralism, anti-Americanism and ambivalence towards the European Union, together with an underlying hostility towards both traditional religion and liberal democracy. Since the collapse of the German Democratic Republic these ideas have struck a particular chord with disillusioned former Communists, trained to respect the so-called ‘Prussian’ values. Brinks highlights the most significant examples of New Right influence: the Historikerstreit, led by historians who tried to relativize the crimes of National Socialism; the reluctance of Chancellor Kohl to recognize the legitimacy of Poland’s western border; the orchestrated hostility towards ‘asylum seekers’ in the early 1990s; the suggestion by the author Martin Walser that the commemoration of Nazi crimes is being used as a ‘moral bludgeon’ to deny Germany its rightful place as a European nation; and the speech by the politician Martin Hohmann insinuating that the Jews are a nation of ‘perpetrators’. He concludes that many New Right ideas have entered the mainstream of political debate, highlighting the success of the right-wing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) in the regional elections of autumn 2004. This mapping of right-wing ideology provides a framework for the close focus on neo-Nazi activism in the paper by Thomas Dörfler and Andreas Klärner, which analyses the Rudolf Hess memorial march. Since Hess, deputy to the Führer, fled to Britain in 1941, he was not implicated in the crimes of the Holocaust. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but his defiant speech in court helped to create the myth of Hess as the ‘good’ German nationalist. Having observed the marches that took place in 2001 and 2002 in rural Germany to commemorate Hess’s death, Dörfler and Klärner, drawing on the theories of Emile Durkheim, analyse the significance of this compelling ritual. History is rewritten so that Hess is seen as a ‘positive’ figure in the fight against

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the ‘false history’ propagated by political orthodoxy. Popular media, including political folksongs as well as Internet sites, help to disseminate the myth, while the march itself creates an existential political community by means of a performative act. As a result, Hess has been transformed into a kind of Che Guevara for the extreme right, and the dramaturgy created around the ‘death of the hero’ helps to inspire utopian visions of a ‘German Germany’. The principal obstacle to this new nationalism is the spectre of the Holocaust. Where right-wing historians have largely failed in their attempts to relativize that uniquely German crime, the documentary films created by the television director Guido Knopp have had, according to the analysis by Michael Elm, a more subtle effect. Knopp’s first fully realized historical docu-drama presented the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 as if it were a sporting encounter, with Hitler and Stalin as team managers and the outcome ultimately decided by chance. His most celebrated documentary, Holokaust, broadcast in six episodes in autumn 2000, deals with Germany’s uniquely burdensome heritage by adopting a Hitlercentred approach and sidelining the involvement of ordinary Germans in war crimes. Interviews with military veterans are constructed so as to suggest that they were eyewitnesses, rather than perpetrators, disregarding the bonding between ‘Volk’ and ‘Führer’ that drove the German war machine. The use of evocative music and tendentious voice-overs results in a blend of information and entertainment best defined as ‘infotainment’. A further series about the plight of the millions of German refugees driven from their homes in the eastern territories at the end of the war suggests that Germans suffered just as much as other victims. Knopp’s innovative visual narratives have attracted large audiences and won many prizes, but discriminating critics have questioned the implication that Hitler was to blame—not simply for the Holocaust—but for betraying a nation that had ‘put its trust’ in him. Participants in political debate find it difficult to escape the shadow of Germany’s fractured past, even when addressing foreign policy issues like the conflict in the Middle East. The following paper, by Antje Schuhmann, analyses the significance of the Israel-Palestine conflict for German identity politics, focusing particularly on the position of former left-wing radicals of the 1968 generation. Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, exemplifies their success in moving into positions of power, but the argument he used to justify sending German troops into Kosovo in 1999 remains controversial. It is wishful thinking to suppose that Germans can be released from their former position as perpetrators

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by supporting campaigns for national liberation. Groups that proclaim their ‘solidarity’ with Palestine are on even shakier ground, since they are in danger of generating a ‘second antisemitism’. This became apparent during the so-called Palestine Days, held in Munich in November 2002, when the keynote speaker tried to legitimize his critique of Israeli human rights abuses by recalling that he had been one of the anti-establishment radicals of the 1960s. The audience is now invited to feel pity for the poor Germans, for whom the very existence of Israel acts as a reminder of ‘Auschwitz’. The implication, here as in other recent pronouncements, is that Jews themselves are to blame for antisemitism. Schuhmann’s analysis is framed by a critique of the very categories used in these debates, from the antithesis between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ to the reliance on collective nouns like ‘the Germans’, ‘the Palestinians’ and ‘the Israelis’. She concludes that for patriotic Germans there is no uncontaminated language available for the expression of national pride. Austrians, too, have problems in coming to terms with their past. In the aftermath of the Second World War they took refuge in the myth that their country (in the words of the Moscow Declaration) was the ‘first victim of Hitlerite aggression’. The fact that Austrians had colluded so enthusiastically with the Nazi regime of terror tended to be conveniently forgotten, until the Waldheim Affair brought the question of war guilt into the open, prompting Chancellor Franz Vranitzky to acknowledge in 1991 that Austrians shared responsibility for the sufferings of millions of victims during the war. For the tabloid newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung, however, those who question the chocolate-box image of Austria promoted by the tourist industry are ‘Nestbeschmutzer’, people who ‘foul their own nest’. The influence of this large-circulation tabloid is the subject of a probing analysis by Lisa El Refaie, who argues that the newspaper is responsible for a crude form of right-wing populism. In 1986 the support of the Neue Kronen Zeitung helped to secure Waldheim’s election as president, while its hostility towards foreigners led it to back Jörg Haider’s xenophobic Austrian Freedom Party. It has subsequently conducted a campaign of vilification against those it regards as ‘unpatriotic’, notably Elfriede Jelinek, author of a series of works that expose the darker side of public life. This confrontation reveals a disturbing gulf between the sophistication of leading Austrian authors and the prejudices of the popular press. Post-Soviet Russia Part Three of our book focuses on nationalist myths and ethnic prejudices in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the tension between tolerant civic

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patriotism and aggressive chauvinism, a tension epitomized by the position of the Orthodox Church, adopted by the nationalist media as a symbol of Russian resurgence. Television and radio have displaced the printed word as primary sources of information, according to the introductory overview by Sergei Zassorin, which stresses the success of radical nationalists in exploiting these media. This is exemplified by Russian House, the television programme fronted by Alexandr Krutov that was broadcast weekly from 1992 until 2003, propagating a blend of Russian nationalism and Orthodox exclusiveness. Adopting an anti-communist, anti-liberal and antisemitic tone, this show provided a platform for extremist groups, earning a reputation as champion of the ‘high ideals of Holy Russia’. In 2003 the programme contributed to the electoral success of the Motherland Bloc, although it also supported Putin’s increasingly nationalistic line. Although Russian House was taken off the air in autumn 2003, giving way to apparently more ‘moderate’ patriotic programmes, Krutov’s views continue to circulate through radio and in print, helping to consolidate Russian ‘intellectual nationalism’. This is accompanied by new forms of antisemitism, directed against members of the business elite, and an increase in hostility towards ethnic minorities. This assessment is confirmed by Tanya Lokshina’s report on a systematic project for monitoring the incidence of ‘hate speech’ in Russian newspapers and Internet sites. A differentiated picture emerges from the use of a scale of categories distinguishing ‘mild’ expressions of xenophobia from overt calls for violence. During the first phase of the project, from October 2001 to April 2002, the findings highlighted the association of specific minority groups (especially from the Caucasus) with ‘criminality’, linked with the accusation that their activities, like those of the Catholic Church, were eroding national identity. The problem intensified during the second phase, especially after the Dubrovka Theatre disaster of October 2002, when Chechen terrorists took the audience hostage, security forces stormed the building and over a hundred people lost their lives. Understandably, there was a dramatic increase in hate speech directed against Chechens, but in this same period attitudes towards Americans also became more hostile in conjunction with the impending invasion of Iraq. The prejudices of the media are rooted in reassessments of modern Russian history, the subject of the following paper by Francis King. There is a split between religiously inspired and secular approaches in a wide range of competing books and Internet sites, with a general tendency to favour conspiracy theories, especially in interpretations of the Bolshevik

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Revolution. Religious nationalists, led by Oleg Platonov and Igor’ Shafarevich, see the fall of Tsarism in February 1917 as the work of a Masonic conspiracy and regard the Bolshevik Revolution as little more than a Jewish takeover. Other writers, like Vadim Kozhinov, place events within a broader framework, seeing the upheaval as a ‘revolution of westernizers’. In Enemies of Russia, published in 1995, Vladimir Zhirinovskii conflates these theories into a lurid account of a co-ordinated onslaught against Russia, involving Freemasons, Bolsheviks, democrats, the CIA, capitalists, Nazis and Jews. The record of Stalin as war-time leader of the Soviet Union raises a different set of questions, with patriotic historians finding ingenious ways of justifying his ruthless policies, including the mass deportation of Chechen and Ingush people to Central Asia in 1944. The assumption underlying all these mythologies is that Russians have been the victims of foreign foes. In a paper contrasting ‘Holy Russia’ with the concept of a ‘Fallen World’, Alexander Verkhovsky explores the interactions between religiously inspired nationalists and the Orthodox Church. Although each of these groups subscribes to a mythical image of ‘Holy Russia’, resisting the apostasy of post-Christian civilization, the nationalists take a more pessimistic and indeed apocalyptic view of global developments, claiming that we are living in the ‘last times’ and anticipating the reign of the Antichrist. The campaign against the introduction of barcodes on goods and taxation documents in Russia was inspired by the perception that they incorporate the apocalyptic number 666, and even the Patriarch has spoken of a struggle against a ‘world-wide system of evil’. The enemy, in an age of globalization, is no longer simply Jews and Freemasons, but liberal civilization as a whole, which is to be resisted by the Church as the only barrier to the march of the Antichrist. Moderate ecclesiastical spokesmen like Metropolitan Kirill address the threat of secular society in more rational terms, but the impact of Orthodox nationalism, enhanced by a sophisticated use of the media, is affecting not only the position of the Patriarchate, but also national politics. Given this climate of apocalyptic thinking, it is hardly surprising that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is enjoying a revival in post-Soviet Russia. This is the subject of a richly documented analysis by Michael Hagemeister, who foregrounds the role of the apocalyptic thinker Sergei Nilus (1862–1929) in the dissemination of this early twentieth-century legend. Although not an antisemite in a racist sense, Nilus believed that Jews, as agents of the Antichrist, have a predetermined role to play in the cosmic drama leading to the end of history. Since the end of the Soviet

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regime, his eschatological writings have been rediscovered and he has become a cult figure among readers who believe Russia to be threatened by satanic forces and Christians by Jewish ritual murder. Writings by Nilus feature prominently in Russia before the Second Coming, an anthology of apocalyptic and anti-Jewish myths published in 1993 by the Holy Trinity-St Sergii Monastery in an edition of 100,000 copies. Jewish defence organizations have been unable to stem this flood of calumnies, especially as the ideas of Nilus have also been taken up by popular historians like Platonov and notorious political groups like Pamiat’. At a more subtle level, the heritage of Nilus lives on in the historical paintings of Il’ia S. Glazunov, Russia’s most popular painter, known by his critics as the ‘king of kitsch’. His gigantic canvas Grand Experiment features the ‘seal of the Antichrist’, taken from the title page of the 1911 edition of The Protocols, which supposedly provides the key to the ordeal endured by Holy Russia at the hands of Marxists and Jews. Hagemeister’s account culminates in a theoretical analysis of the power of such Manichaean myths, which divide the world into absolute categories of good and evil, and claim that history is guided by an eschatological master plan and that this hidden plan will be revealed at the end of time in the final battle between God and Satan. This is the ‘anthropological constant’ at the base of conspiracy theories. The power of this Manichaean worldview is enhanced by its adaptability. Former Marxists committed to the war against the class enemy may be reborn as fundamentalist Christians who demonize the spectre of globalization. In a final paper, Stella Rock analyses the canonization of controversial figures for political purposes, showing that ‘national saints’, officially recognized by the Orthodox Church, constitute an important element in Russian political mythology. The epitome of the sanctified warrior prince is Aleksandr Nevskii, who became a cult figure during the Great Patriotic War, but the most significant developments fall in the post-Soviet period. After a vigorous media campaign by religiously inspired nationalists, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra were canonized by the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000 as ‘passion-bearers’ who endured their fate during the revolution with exemplary piety. The success of this campaign has led to an even more controversial attempt to rehabilitate Rasputin, seen as the victim of innumerable calumnies, who is now presented as a representative of ‘martyred Russia’. The arguments of Platonov, the leading figure in this campaign, are creating a new myth of Rasputin as pious man of the people, a miracle-worker who endured a form of ‘ritual murder’. Although the Patriarchate has so far resisted these arguments, the campaign

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has the potential to resonate strongly among Russians who are only too aware of the ways in which their history was falsified under Soviet rule. Conclusion It might be comforting if we could conclude that history does indeed have a ‘master plan’, shaped not by biblical prophecy but by the progressive dynamics of liberal capitalism. This would imply that the ‘backwardness’ of Russia is destined to be corrected by the ‘enlightened’ influence of western democracy. The problem is that many of the regressive tendencies noted above arise from the understandable perception among ordinary Russians that their country has absorbed the worst features of capitalism: the stripping of state assets, the manipulation of the media, the centralization of political power, endemic criminality, intolerance of ethnic minorities and an alarming gulf between pensioners clamouring for state support and oligarchs stashing their wealth away abroad. The democratic western world is further compromised by disturbing parallels between the two extremes, especially the climate of millenarian thinking that flourishes among religious fundamentalists in both Russia and the United States. Russia before the Second Coming may have been published in an edition of a 100,000 copies, but its American equivalent, the Left Behind series of apocalyptic fantasies by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, has sold fifty million copies. The conclusions reached in this book are likely to prove controversial. The most surprising finding is the enduring power of political myths in an age that prides itself on educational advance and economic efficiency. Global systems of communication, which might have been expected to reduce international tensions, appear more often to have reawakened archaic fears of ‘the other’. The tendency to represent the national interest in terms of an antithesis between friend and foe results in disturbing symmetries. There are Manichaean and messianic tendencies in the political discourse of both Russia and the United States, while fear of Islam tends to prompt strong reactions in both the White House and the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the prospects of peace in the Middle East remain bedevilled by the long-term legacy of Zionism combined with the hostility of militant Islam. Nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and other parts of the developing world constitute further destablizing factors. Although they fall outside the scope of the present book, this does not imply that they should be regarded as insignificant. Indeed, the growing economic power of China might help to redress the global imbalance caused by the dominance of a single superpower. Old Europe, denounced by the Pentagon

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for its opposition to pre-emptive military action in Iraq, may also provide a counterweight, as it moves towards greater political unity. It is certainly ironic that, with their history of military conflict and involvement in the international arms trade, European nations like France and Germany should feel impelled to give the New World lessons in the value of patient diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution. Given the focus of this book on nationalistic myths disseminated through the media, it may be appropriate to conclude with an aphorism by Karl Kraus, published shortly after the outbreak of the First World War: ‘How is the world governed and how do wars begin? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and believe them when they see them in print.’ Acknowledgements The editors would like to express their gratitude to the following individuals and institutions: the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding the project on ‘Nationalist Myths and Modern Media’ that launched the conference and inspired this book; the University of Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies for providing institutional support; Dr Tiziana Tonna for organizing the conference held in October 2003, and Aaron Winter for his assistance with the design of the programme; Chatham House for allowing us to use their premises in central London as our venue; the Shoresh Foundation, the Consultative Council of Jewish Organisations and the British Embassy in Moscow for conributing towards speakers’ costs; and the numerous colleagues who attended the conference, only a selection of whose papers could be included in this book. We were fortunate in having the participation of experienced newspapermen like David Binder of the New York Times and Gerry Gable of Searchlight, as well as scholarly researchers, and it was the dialogue between academic historians and campaigning journalists that gave the conference its critical edge. The result is a book that combines historical depth with topical engagement. We are grateful to Lester Crook and Kate Sheratt of I.B. Tauris for their guidance during the publication process; to Beryl Williams and Paul Betts for advice on the revision of our papers for publication; and finally to Barbara Rosenbaum for the skill with which she polished the complete manuscript and prepared camera-ready copy. The Library of Congress system of Russian transliterations (without diacritics) has been used throughout, except in the case of well-known proper and geographical names where there is a standard English spelling (e.g. Yeltsin, not El’tsin; Kandinsky not Kandinskii). In the transliteration of contributors’ names, individual preferences were respected.

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‘IF I RULED THE WORLD’ National Interest and Global Responsibility in American Foreign Policy Stephen Burman

Worldwide focus on the United States of America has never been greater. In the wake of the second Gulf War there is a growing awareness of American domination of world affairs, and news about the US dominates the media as never before. It is now the conventional wisdom that the United States is enjoying a period of global pre-eminence that is without historical parallel. It has responded to the challenges of the post-Cold War world with vigour, reshaping that world in its own image, or at least attempting to do so. This process has an air of inevitability, as the exercise of power often does, but in American foreign policy there is a cycle of assertiveness and withdrawal that suggests that the current phase may not be as durable as it appears. Cyclical patterns in foreign policy We can observe this cycle if we cast our minds back over the post-war world. The United States was initially uncertain as to its role after 1945, and there was serious contemplation of a retreat to the isolationism that had long been an aspect of American attitudes to the outside world. With the dawn of the Cold War, uncertainty gave way to an embrace of its world-power status and of its leading role in the reconstruction of both Europe and Japan. This period of high engagement in world affairs, manifest also in the Korean War, was followed by a period of retreat and self-doubt in the late 1950s, when there was talk of missile gaps and a chronic fear of losing the battle with Communism. The inauguration of John F. Kennedy as president, with his bold declaration of America’s willingness to ‘bear any burden and pay any price in the defence of freedom’, set the stage for a new generation, resulting in a revival of spirit and

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belief in US leadership during the 1960s. However, the confidence this bred led ineluctably to interventions abroad that were characterized by the hubris and venality of the Johnson and Nixon eras. A reaction was inevitable and there followed a period under Jimmy Carter in which the United States became very conscious of the limits to its power. The loss of will was crystallized by Carter’s apparent impotence in the face of the taking of American hostages in Iran. The cycle moved to its next phase with the Reagan revival, characterized by a determination to restore the United States to the number-one position in world affairs. Despite the uplifting effect of Reagan on the American spirit, by the end of the 1980s the talk was of long-term decline, and the phrase ‘imperial overstretch’ was coined to capture the phenomenon. The argument was that the extensive world role the United States had played had drained its economic resources and left it with an economic base unable to sustain the burden of global management. This objective weakness came to be associated with a loss of self-belief and fear that US lacked the fortitude necessary for a hegemonic power. Then came ‘victory’ in the Cold War, which restored America’s faith in itself, since it was widely seen as victory for the uncompromising line that Reagan’s administration had taken in combating Communism. The firmness of belief that underpinned this hard line derived from a Manichaean perspective in which the Cold War was seen starkly as a battle between good and evil. At the start of the 1990s America’s decisiveness in facing the challenge posed by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was informed by a new-found confidence that good would triumph. Even so, fear of decline persisted beyond the victory in the first Gulf War. Bush’s defeat in the 1992 election was the result of a persistent sense of economic vulnerability among Americans and a belief that the priority should be to get their own economic house in order rather than engage in adventures overseas, a perspective captured in the famous injunction to Clinton’s campaign workers: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ This, besides being an effective political dictum, expressed the contemporary mindset in which Americans were fearful of their ability to hold their own and saw growing international competition as a threat to their prosperity. The reaction of the Clinton administration to the post-Cold War world was informed by two complementary ideas. The first was that the United States was operating in an ungrateful world. The US was felt to have behaved selflessly in the post-war world, acting from a commitment to the general good and to universal principles of justice rather than

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narrow self-interest. Others by contrast, and Europe in particular, had been unwilling to take their share of responsibility for security. The most pressing example was the growing instability in the Balkans, where the administration felt that, in the absence of a threat from the Soviet Union, the European Union should intervene to stabilize the situation in its own backyard rather than waiting for the United States to do so. Allied to this was the perception that America should begin to see itself as an ordinary country rather than one with inexhaustible resources to defend freedom across the globe This required a redefinition of national interest, making it both broader, in that it raised the protection of economic interests to a par with protecting security, and narrower, in that it gave national interest priority over America’s global role. This was a considerable departure because the idea that the United States was a qualitatively different kind of country that acted for the general good had been the key to the interventionist phases of American foreign policy. To jettison this perspective implied a retreat from global responsibility. The initial reaction under Clinton may have been to retrench, but withdrawal was untenable for three reasons. First, US interests were too intertwined with those of the wider world. This had become increasingly true of economic interests where American trade and investment in the world economy was essential to global prosperity. Second, the dangers of a power vacuum were real. The only alternatives to American hegemony, a true balance of power or a global consensus, were difficult to envisage. Third, American idealism had not really disappeared; instead it took on the new guise of democratic enlargement and a broader human rights agenda. The United States was drawn by this agenda into a position that appeared to justify heavy intervention not simply in international conflicts, but more proactively in the internal affairs of other nations, if this strategy was to be effectively pursued. The long boom in the economy during the 1990s underpinned the restoration of confidence in the superiority of the free market and gave energy to America’s engagement with international affairs. In the economic sphere this led to active policymaking in shaping the international economy, manifest in American policy towards the World Trade Organization, towards Russia, China and Latin America, and even on such matters as environmental policy. The new interventionism extended beyond economic affairs to such an extent that by the end of the century the danger was not lack of engagement, but the opposite. The Balkans provides the most obvious example, but other areas were equally affected. In the Middle East the United States brooked no intervention from other powers that

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would challenge its dominant role, while in Taiwan, at the first sign of provocation from the Chinese, the US sent no less than two aircraft carrier task forces to the Taiwan straits as evidence of its resolve. Apart from economic prosperity, America’s renewed confidence in this phase was based on a firm belief in the effectiveness of its constitutional system as a guarantor of freedom and democracy and as the model for others to follow. One problem with this is the conflict it can bring both with supra-national organizations, such as the United Nations, and with other friendly nation-states. By virtue of its power and self-belief it is very difficult for the United States to acknowledge any higher authority. The contrast with other states is not absolute since no state relinquishes its sovereignty to the UN. The difference is that, where other powers recognize the need for a pooling of sovereignty and a multilateral approach in a globalized world, the US continues to wrestle with the possibility of going it alone and of actively reshaping the world through the global projection of its own structures and values, a process that not only brings it into conflict with international organizations, but also with other states who see American policy as unilateral, domineering and even imperialist. There is a broader theme at play here than economic and political engagement. We heard much under the Clinton administration of the United States as an ‘indispensable nation’, but the deeper question is the extent to which America can be seen as an exemplary nation. It enjoys political stability, economic dynamism, cultural vitality and relative social harmony. Beyond this the institutional guarantee of freedom, justice and democracy that the constitution and its institutions provide is vital to Americans’ sense of their society. This structure of governance is distinctive in being the product of a deliberate, self-conscious act at the time of the American Revolution. In this, the country differs from the pattern we associate with older states in which political institutions emerged and evolved gradually over a long historical period. The American system is therefore the embodiment of a rational ideal of a good society as conceived during the Enlightenment rather than being the product of a messy evolutionary history with all its political accidents and ideological compromises. Lacking as it does the historical antecedents that govern European or Asian societies, the United States is bound together by its ideals and their institutional expression. We should not overdraw the contrast; the United States is not the only country to have experienced revolution. We can think of Russia, France and China as obvious examples among the major powers. But for other states the revolution, however dramatic at the time, can be seen in

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historical perspective as an episode in the story of nations with deep characteristics that reassert themselves and gradually overcome the effects of the revolutionary upheaval. Of course the United States had antecedents in colonial America and in its English heritage, but it is nonetheless plausible to claim that, among strong states, the American Revolution is unique in representing the birth pangs of society, not its growing pains, and that its subsequent history is a working through of the ideals that brought it into being. Non-Americans often note the frequency of references to the flag, the anthem and the constitution as artefacts that have gained a virtually sacred status in public life and have become shibboleths of Americanism. The same commentators often find this character difficult to admire and see it as a sign of self-obsession at best and an arrogant appropriation of virtue at worst. Rather than an object of derision, however, we should see this political culture as the natural product of a unique history and as the essential glue of American social coherence. It has enabled a remarkable continuity, resilience and stability through America’s dramatic transformation from a small, Anglo-dominated seaboard country to a vast multicultural world power. It is difficult to imagine how Americans would have the energy and fortitude to act as boldly as they do in the modern world without the myths and symbols that colour their political culture. The concept of the United States as the exemplary nation reinforces the myth of American difference. In the twentieth century the uniquely moral character that this idealist foundation gave to American foreign policy was first articulated by President Wilson, who created a perspective in which policy was governed by a desire to extend the benefits of domestic American society to less fortunate brethren abroad. It is this deep-rooted optimism that underlies the belief that, in the words of a celebrated song, ‘If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring’. This was the perspective that saw the United States accept the role of world power after 1945 in order to fill a power vacuum that threatened anarchy in international affairs at best and the triumph of godless Communism at worst. Similarly at the end of the Cold War another vacuum was created by the disappearance of Communism, and this again required America to search its soul as the most powerful country on earth and decide what role it wished to play. The answer, engagement based on duty and global responsibility, has been the same. A new American century? It is not surprising then that, despite Clinton’s initial hesitations, the 1990s saw gradual re-engagement by the United States. Under Clinton, however,

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engagement retained a multilateral inflection; there was still a balance between national interest and global responsibility in foreign policy with the multilateral dimension acting to reconcile a sense of higher purpose with self-interest. It is the presidency of George W. Bush that has threatened this balance. To see this we need to recognize the radical character of his administration. It was seen initially by most commentators as reviving the isolationist strand in US foreign policy and rejecting ideas of nation-building and the promotion of human rights. According to conventional wisdom it was the events of 9/11, the devastating attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, that forced it reluctantly to engage with the wider world. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Those driving policy under Bush entered office determined to establish American hegemony on an unprecedented scale. This was evident initially in their overturning of the strategic doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction that had governed security policy during the Cold War. It was replaced with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which sought to guarantee the US absolute security by means of a protective shield, some of it space-based. This was in effect an updated version of the Reaganite Star Wars proposals of the 1980s. This was an understandable goal from the American point of view since, if practical, the defence system would produce the holy grail of absolute national security. Seen from the perspective of other powers, however, the immunity from attack that the SDI would provide also guaranteed America’s immunity from retribution and therefore gave it carte blanche to act as it wished. This was seen as potentially very destabilizing, given the record of American interventionism in the post-war world. The new US strategic doctrine eschewed Cold War notions of security through a balance of power in favour of one of American domination. It was based on the following analysis. In the absence of a great adversary the United States had a unique historical opportunity to impose itself on the world. The Cold War had shaped and enhanced American power, but containing Communism also contained US power. The post-Cold War world imposed no such constraints, and foreign policy therefore needed to be rethought on the premise of the need to take seriously the implications of being the only superpower. Under Clinton the US had not realized its full potential, but this new administration felt it must seize the opportunity to create a new American century. The impact of 9/11 on American foreign policy must be seen in this context. Its effect on the American psyche was profound. The destruction of the Twin Towers, globally recorded through the medium of

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television, made Americans feel acutely vulnerable for the first time in their history. The subsequent policies of the Bush administration and their acceptance by so many Americans are only explicable as the expression of a collective response to trauma. This explains why the tenuous link between al-Qaida and Iraq was accepted as fact even though the purported link did not stand up to serious interrogation. After 9/11 policy came to be driven not only by ambition but also but also by fear and insecurity, which is a potent mixture. But there is a further explanation that is nearer the mark. It is clear that influential forces in the administration used genuine fears created by 9/11 to further a pre-existing agenda. This is a serious charge and may appear callous to the victims, but 9/11 did have the effect of identifying a clearly defined and tangible enemy. This created a sense of clear and present danger and therefore of an unimpeachable rationale for decisive action. It is arguable that all points on the political spectrum interpreted the events of 9/11 to reinforce a pre-existing perspective rather than to develop a new one, but the use to which 9/11 was put by senior members of the Bush administration betrays the scale of their ambition. Aspirations of this magnitude rely not only on power but also on a set of ideas and myths that create a mentality to justify them. It is important to recognize that, for this administration, as for Americans generally, the motivation lies in the belief that the United States does not exercise power for its own sake or even purely for the defence of national interests. Rather, the exercise of power is a responsibility they have incurred in the service of a higher authority. According to this view, the post-Cold War system of international affairs creates a need for the exercise of global responsibility because the global system will not run itself, either in economic or security terms. The threat that globalization presents is one of massive instability. One of the virtues of the Cold War world was that it was governed by a clear set of mutual expectations and rules of conduct. Brinkmanship may have been its hallmark, but the consequences of going over the brink were so great that they imposed great discipline on the behaviour of the superpowers. It is precisely this discipline that is lacking in the post-Cold War world. This is why it is so dangerous and why, according to this new model, there is a need for a strong, stable and benign force to take control of events. The logic of this argument is that some entity has to enforce new rules of conduct in the interest of all, for the alternative is chaos. So far this analysis might enjoy wide currency; where it becomes distinctive under the present American administration is in the rejection of a multilateral approach to the creation and justification of the new rules of international

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conduct. For the Bush administration multilateralism is for wimps, little more than a code for allowing the weak states to dictate and implying an abdication of America’s responsibility to lead. This perspective explains its view of the Clinton interregnum, a series of years wasted on the pursuit of multilateralism sandwiched between two Bush administrations that understood the true nature of American leadership, namely, that only the US can provide leadership and it should not be apologetic about pursuing its interests because they coincide with the best interests of everyone. This is a perspective that is breathtaking in its audacity and confidence. Not only are its advocates unafraid of power, but the level of self-belief is such that they hope to remake the world in their own image. There is evidence of this in the new national security strategy published in the summer of 2003. This codifies the new threat to American security, arguing that the danger no longer emanates from states with armies, but from a combination of international terrorists and rogue states. The new threat requires new measures to combat it. Hence the development of two new concepts that have been incorporated into national security strategy: the first of these is that the United States will allow no state, or combination of states, to develop the capacity to challenge it militarily. This is significant because it is a claim that the US can and will make permanent its current military ascendancy. The second concept is that the United States reserves the right to act pre-emptively to forestall emerging threats to its security, even to the point of imposing regime change where it is felt to be necessary. With these two concepts the administration has, in effect, given itself a free hand to create a world in which there is no threat to American security. This strategy creates a tension between realism and morality, between practical politics and nationalist myth. Policy statements are couched in ultra-realist terms, but the underlying reality is that the Americans believe they have a mission that goes well beyond the necessities of Realpolitik. Rather than thinking in terms of basic interests common to all states, their perspective is both messianic and Manichaean. It is the claim that policy can be justified in terms of the struggle of good against evil, and that in this battle America exists to serve a higher authority, a policy that allows Americans to overcome the normal observance of respect for the sovereignty of other states. The implications are far from peaceable because they lower the threshold of aggression by diminishing the moral virtue of opponents. This, in combination with its overwhelming military power, allows the United States a degree of self-righteousness that permits it to ignore world opinion. It is a mentality that can allow the American

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government to trample on other cultures in the name of imposing higher values, and to do so without even realizing they are doing it. It is this vision that gives them their drive and explains their willingness to ignore usual norms that justify military action. The belief that they act from higher motives than others provides a perverse rationale for brutality, as have religiously inspired visions throughout the ages. We should be under no illusions: this American sense of mission to remake the newly globalized world in their own image is the new religion. It is only this vision that makes sense of current American policies, for without it the justification for them is threadbare. Cruder versions of this vision argue that the United States has history on its side, that the whole world wants to be like, or is becoming more like, America and that the triumph of the American model is historically inevitable. Such proselytizing has, of course, engendered a major debate in which the alternative view, that the US is a decadent society and an American-inspired future for humankind is a dystopian vision, has many advocates. The gap between inside and outside perspectives is crucial here, for even where Americans question the rightness of their government’s policies, they tend to see them as mistakes and their image of their country remains one in which its intentions are noble. One consequence of this myth of selfrighteousness is a growing gap between how America sees itself and how the rest of the world sees it. Outside the United States many question not only the correctness of particular policies, such as the invasion of Iraq, but the very purpose of American foreign policy, seeing it as the inevitable product of a militarized state fixated by its own power, confident of its own superiority, inured to self-doubt and imperialist in all but name. The clash of cultures Americans cleave to anti-colonialism but are seen as the ultimate imperialist nation; they see themselves as liberators, but are viewed as oppressors by many of those they claim to liberate; they see their actions as inspired by idealism, where others see them as the embodiment of the doctrine that might is right; where Americans see absolutism in their enemies, they are blind to their own absolutism; what they see as duty, others see as an overweening arrogance that tramples on the values and traditions of older, more sophisticated societies. Indeed, at this point in history, dominated as it seems to be by a ‘clash of cultures’, this conflict of perspectives has assumed enormous significance in international affairs. It is not too much to suggest that these days the question before us all appears to be: are you for or are you against the United States?

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The danger here lies in the tension between self-righteousness and zealotry. The Bush administration is operating in the border zone between secular and religious approaches to foreign policy. In so far as American policy is driven by the sense of responding to a higher power, expansion becomes a moral imperative and a matter of duty. The commitment to save humanity from itself is indeed a high calling, but it is one that can elide easily from a secular struggle into a belief that the Americans are fighting the good fight not simply for humanitarian reasons but because they are fighting for their God, a very particular form of the Christian deity. This conception was easy to adopt in the fight against godless Communism. But it has proved very malleable, readily adapted to the succeeding fight against Islam, in so far as the latter is perceived as inextricably bound up with terror and the threat to the American world order. Both of America’s great enemies have been construed as infinitely evil powers that will stop at nothing to achieve their aims. The danger of this construction is that it establishes the need for an equally unrestrained response to defeat it. If this view of the motivation behind American foreign policy is accepted then it would follow that the war in Iraq is just the first instalment in a larger plan that will gradually unfold. In the first instance it is part of a wider ambition to reconstruct the Middle East and reconfigure it into a more democratic, stable and amenable formation. Beyond this, the rationale behind the role of the Iraq war in the wider conflict is to deter other potential challengers to America’s domination. The Bush administration believes that, by showing strength and resolve in the face of Saddam Hussein and demonstrating their military might, they will prevent other potential challengers from mobilizing against the United States. This will in turn give America a freer hand in its peaceable attempts to reconstruct internal regimes and international institutions along lines that reflect its own values and institutional structures. In short, the intention has been that the Iraq war would so clearly establish American power, creating a myth of invincibility, that it would obviate the need for further similar actions. Of course, such large ambitions carry equally large attendant risks. If the engagement in Iraq, in its reconstruction phase, demonstrates the limits of American power, then the effect on potential challengers will be the opposite of what was intended. Further, by exposing their own weakness in an adventure that was intended to impose their will, they not only embolden potential opponents but give them the added motivation of revenge for the insults they feel they have experienced at the hands of the Americans.

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If our purpose is to explore the myths that are being created and revived by nationalists in an era of globalization, then the myth of American idealism and universalism is perhaps the most significant of all. In the years since the end of the Cold War a worldview has been created that has strengthened the self-righteous and arrogant strands of the American mentality. The pull factor inspiring this has been the power vacuum in international affairs created by the end of the certainties of the Cold War and the subsequent acceleration of an uncharted process of globalization. To an extent that few could have imagined in the early 1990s, the United States has moved to fill that vacuum. As a spur to that process, new enemies have been created and new imperatives to act have been articulated, rationalized by an accompanying myth of American virtue and implemented by American power. The essential point is that the conjunction of universalism and globalization is a recipe for hubris. By definition globalization initiates a process of the breaking down of former barriers to communication and interaction. This is driven initially by economic integration and the spread of the market economy but, with remarkable speed, it has spread to political, cultural and indeed moral spheres. When combined with the assumption that what America has to offer is indisputably superior and the embodiment of universal ideals, the danger of intolerance inherent in the imposition of American values is obvious. The occupation of Iraq is the extreme case, but this is only the most obvious example of a potentially overweening nationalism that has few inherent limits. This unprecedented conjunction of affairs presents us with historic choices as to the direction the world should take in what is evidently a new age. World affairs have become unbalanced as a result of American preeminence, and the task of those who wish to restore a sense of balance is to challenge this self-constructed and self-serving American myth of legitimacy. We must puncture the myth that the United States alone embodies the highest aspirations of human dignity. This is not a call for a crude antiAmericanism. Blanket condemnation of US policies is both unwarranted and unnecessary, since it fails to acknowledge the openness of American society, which permits many dissenting voices. Above all, we must avoid the characteristic American tendency to demonize those who do not share the same values and priorities. A more measured approach is necessary: we do not need to accept America as the selfless giant of its own imagining, but nor do we need to caricature it as the vulgar behemoth imagined by some of its opponents. We certainly do not have to accept George Bush as the shining knight envisioned by his more fundamentalist

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supporters, but nor is he the devil incarnate as others forms of fundamentalism would have it. We do not need to reject the idea of constructing a global consensus; rather we must demonstrate that there are other values, other forms of social interaction that can embody universal aspirations for mankind. This does not mean renouncing the ideals of liberty, but it does mean not allowing them to become a tool of the rich and a mask for indifference to inequality and injustice. It means using these timeless ideals to create an environment in which all can share in their pursuit by means of trust, respect and consensus-building. Moreover, it means creating values that do not depend on market forces or military might or the power of the nation-state for their realization because they are values that respect difference and celebrate diversity. There is an urgent need for a system of checks and balances in world affairs to create space for this alternative to flourish, since it is not present either in US policies or in the processes of globalization. Today the United States alone has the power and the will to act, and this endows its political strategy with a mythological dimension. This in turn perhaps explains the feeling that we are living through a process that is driven by destiny. Surely, the United Nations should reassert its leadership role to counterbalance these dangers. At the same time American ideologists should recall that skilful leaders know they must avoid hubris and placate the gods if they are to avoid the nemesis that awaits those who do not heed the warning signs. The language may be mythic, but the consequences of ignoring these dangers will be real, and they will affect us all.

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A GLOBAL MASTER PLAN? The American Far Right and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion Martin Durham

Since its creation in the 1890s, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion has had an impact in many different countries. In Russia, its appearance in the early years of the twentieth century fed the pogromist appetites of the antisemitic Black Hundreds. In the early 1920s in Germany, it was the subject of an extended commentary by the leading Nazi Party theoretician, Alfred Rosenberg, and in the post-war period, it has continued to exercise a malign influence in Europe, in the United States and in the Middle East. The nationalisms it has shaped are mythical, visions of a land that is at the same time pure and decadent, inhabited by heroes and endangered by traitors. But it is mythical in another sense. The Protocols was a forgery, constructed by Tsarist secret police agents over a century ago as the supposed proof of a Jewish conspiracy against thrones, landed aristocracies and a divinely ordained social order. Created in a vain effort to protect a tottering regime from the acids of modernity, The Protocols portrayed liberals and radicals, socialists and bankers, as different faces of a single enemy. Calling on images that had long been in circulation, The Protocols depicted an age-old Jewish conspiracy that controlled the press, attacked religion and had created a ‘filthy, abominable literature’. Through their control of gold, plotters would unleash an economic crisis that would throw hosts of workers on to the streets and into the arms of their supposed socialist saviours. Ultimately, led by a despotic ruler, the conspiracy would triumph, and a world government would arise from the ashes of sovereign states.1 As was discovered soon after its publication in the West, much of it was plagiarized from a polemic against mid-nineteenth century Bonapartism and transposed from a critique into a defence of authoritarian rule. Once

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The Protocols began to circulate outside Russia, what it sought to accomplish also changed. It proved remarkably adaptable, able to defend republics as well as monarchies, urban entrepreneurs as well as landed property. The ability of a nineteenth-century Tsarist forgery to make the transition to very different contexts is well demonstrated by its history in the United States. Moreover, its enduring influence seems not to be dependent on variations in the mode of publication. The books, pamphlets and journals produced by far-right groups have continued to proliferate, almost as if, in the case of this time-honoured publication, the printed page had a greater legitimacy than the more glamorous medium of the Internet. Early American responses The Protocols first appeared in an American edition in 1920. Much of its notoriety derived from the attention it received in the pages of the Dearborn Independent, a weekly paper published by the automobile magnate Henry Ford. Articles that had appeared on ‘the Jewish Question’ from 1920 to 1922 were then brought together in four volumes, The International Jew. It was this, one historian was later to declare, that was probably responsible more than any other source for making The Protocols widely known. 2 While Ford did not organize a political faction around his paper, both The International Jew and The Protocols were to be crucial for a host of groupings. In the 1920s the most important extreme-right organization in the United States was the Ku Klux Klan. Initially formed in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the first Klan ceased to exist in the early 1870s, but it was revived in 1915. Where once its very reason for existence had been the defence of white supremacy in a defeated South, the second Klan attracted a mass following across much of America. Committed not only to racism but to anti-Catholicism, the re-established organization was also receptive to antisemitism. Thus, as Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab note, its publications ‘frequently reprinted parts of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which they took from Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent’.3 Much of the Klan’s support had fallen away by the end of the 1920s, but neither antisemitism nor the extreme right that espoused it experienced a comparable fate. Instead, the Great Depression that was to dominate the 1930s dramatically increased the potential reservoir of support for an antisemitic reading of the urban unemployment and rural crisis that had hit the American economy. That the catastrophe led to the election of Franklin Roosevelt and to the development of the New Deal only strengthened this conviction. In response to the growth of the federal government and the supposed extension of Jewish power it entailed, a new extreme right emerged.

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No longer shaped by the experience of the defeated Confederacy, the new movement was also not as uniformly committed to Protestantism as the Klan of the 1920s. Where, for instance, one of its leading figures, Gerald Winrod, was a Protestant pastor, another, Charles Coughlin, was a Catholic priest. A third, William Dudley Pelley, claimed to have psychically contacted Christ and received his support.4 All three were enthusiastic about developments in Europe. Winrod, who had founded the Defenders of the Christian Faith in the 1920s, visited Germany after the Nazi seizure of power. Hitler, he declared, had discovered that ‘centers of vice’ and ‘the filthy screen and stage’ were under the control of Jews who sought ‘to tear down the Gentile morals of the nation’. Pelley’s decision at the beginning of 1933 to inaugurate his organization, the Silver Shirts, had come in immediate response to the Nazi leader’s attainment of office. Coughlin, who created the National Union for Social Justice in 1934, was the most important of the three. His movement, when it looked across the Atlantic, felt particular empathy for Spain’s General Franco.5 However they might differ in their theology or the continental movements they felt closest to, all three drew on The Protocols in their propaganda. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers, Winrod declared, believed in an international conspiracy, and he promised to examine The Protocols in the light of biblical prophecy. A Jewish elite, he claimed, ‘had played satanic roles in a divinely directed drama now drawing to a close’. For Coughlin, an unseen force controlled the media, the banks and governments. The authorship of The Protocols could not be proved, he contended, but making its contents known would enable the people to see that tyranny and poverty were the result of planning by the enemies of Christianity, ‘the synagogue of Satan’. Pelley too held that there was no purpose in continuing to argue about the authenticity of The Protocols. All that needed to be done was to compare it with what was happening in Russia and in the United States. With ‘our American Land of Canaan almost completely in the possession of the Israelites, politically as well as economically’, it was time to study The Protocols and see how it predicted what was now coming to pass. 6 Most of the movements that had arisen in the 1930s did not survive the war, and antisemitism was severely weakened by its association with Nazi Germany. But the extreme right continued after 1945. For Gerald L. K. Smith, who had been prominently involved in the 1930s and was briefly the leading figure in the early post-war years, the provenance of The Protocols could not be doubted, for it described events that were then taking place. Similarly, in 1950 a vehemently antisemitic publication named

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Women’s Voice, which had first seen the light of day during the Second World War, reprinted a claim by the group that had published The Protocols in Britain thirty years earlier. The Protocols, the Britons Publishing Society declared, bore all the marks of having been ‘drawn up by the Jews’ in the late nineteenth century. It was vital that it now be read, for the pamphlet was ‘THE KEY to the present world situation’.7 Post-war developments It was not, however, those groups of the inter-war period that set the right-wing agenda when new challenges emerged at the beginning of the 1950s. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in education must come to an end, a decision that unleashed massive resistance throughout the South. In time, the conflict over African Americans’ civil rights spilled over into the North. The result of this chain of developments was both to breathe new life into the Klan and give birth to new groupings. The Klan revived in a number of rival incarnations and, in the years that followed, would go through further mutations. Another manifestation of Southern racism, the National States Rights Party, came into existence in 1957, but a more significant grouping emerged in the North the following year, the American Nazi Party. Once again The Protocols were to play a prominent part. In the early 1960s the National States Rights Party’s paper published extracts from The International Jew. As The Protocols had stated, it declared, ‘the Jewish world power does today constitute a super-government’. Moreover, the methods the conspiracy would use had been laid out in its pages, from attacks on Christianity to control of the press and the indoctrination of young people. Subsequently the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, declared that The Protocols had successfully predicted what the Jews would do in the way of world wars, inflations, depressions, and moral subversions. . . . They enable humanity, for the first time, to understand what, before, seemed impossible chaos . . . the mad “art”, the Communism, the moral filth, the control of the press and entertainment . . . the insane setting of labor against capital and vice versa—all these things become calculated elements of a steadily progressing plan.8 After Rockwell’s assassination by a former supporter in 1967, American Nazism splintered. The National States Rights Party was eventually to pass away, but one of the southern party’s characteristics was to prove

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of more lasting importance. In the 1940s, some on the extreme right had begun to preach Christian Identity, a religious-racial doctrine that held that Whites were the lost tribes of Israel and they, not the satanic Jews, were Yahweh’s elect. The National States Rights Party was an early supporter of its claims, and The Protocols has continued to find favour among Identity’s adherents. In the late 1980s, for instance, The Seditionist, edited by former Klansman and Identity believer Louis Beam, declared that The International Jew revealed the origin of the evils that were besetting nation and race; its particular value was the way it showed how The Protocols, ‘the master battle-plan of world Jewry’, was being carried out. The following decade, another Identity publication, Nationalist Free Press, declared that The Protocols were ‘basically a blueprint for the continuation of the Jewish program of conquest’ that, as Ford had declared in the early 1920s, ‘fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.’ Support for The Protocols was also to be found among those antisemites who rejected Christian Identity. For the Church of the Creator, a grouping initially launched in the 1980s and then re-established in the following decade, Christianity had been deliberately created ‘to confuse and confound the Gentiles’. But, while bitterly critical of Christian Identity, the Church concurred with its view of The Protocols. It was, the Church’s founder claimed, ‘the most diabolic program’ for subjugation that had ever been conceived, the secret plan of the ‘Jewish insiders that rule the world’. Every white man and woman should study ‘this ferocious and deadly document . . . to get a better understanding of the Jewish conspiracy’.9 Such views were not universally held among American antisemites. A leading figure in the Klan of the 1980s, David Duke, was subsequently to build his own National Association for the Advancement of White People and was elected as a Republican state legislator in Louisiana. In the late 1990s, no longer restricted by office, he published an extended attack on ‘the facts of Jewish power’. Just as Russia had been taken over at the end of the First World War, he declared, the Jews had now taken control of the United States. But this did not mean that he believed in The Protocols. The Elders of Zion were ‘fanciful’, he proclaimed. Jews warred against Gentiles not because of some ancient plot but because the desire for domination was in their nature. 10 Duke was not alone in simultaneously dismissing The Protocols while still espousing antisemitism. In 1970 a former Rockwell lieutenant, William Pierce, broke with the American Nazi Party’s main successor organization to take the leading role in a recently launched group, the National Youth Alliance. Transformed four years later into the National

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Alliance, the new grouping sought to avoid identification with the Third Reich while championing many of its beliefs, and Pierce would eventually become America’s best-known extreme rightist, particularly as a result of his authorship of The Turner Diaries, a fictional portrayal of a successful guerrilla war against America’s Jewish rulers. As with his many non-fictional writings, Pierce was an unashamedly antisemitic author. But this did not mean that he was an exponent of The Protocols. Indeed, his antisemitism was crucial to his belief that the pamphlet was probably not what it purported to be. ‘When a group of Jewish leaders get together to discuss their plans for the destruction of a host nation’, he claimed, ‘they don’t use straightforward expressions’, but speak of ‘increasing diversity’ or ‘eliminating inequality’. Nor was it plausible that they would have laid out their plans in such detail. But this did not mean that The Protocols should be seen as a forgery. It fitted what was happening, and it did so because the Russian patriot who had written it had been an astute observer of Jewish plans.11 Alternative conspiracy theories As Pierce and Duke demonstrate, it would be a mistake to assume all antisemites believe in the authenticity of The Protocols, but for over eighty years this forgery has exerted an enduring influence over the American extreme right. Its history in the United States, however, has had another dimension. By the time The Protocols reached its shores, antisemitic images were already in circulation, but the ground had been laid for it in another way. For decades Americans had already been drawn to conspiracism, sometimes anti-Catholic, sometimes anti-British, sometimes involving Freemasons. Where The Protocols reflected the views of the Russian counterrevolution, over a century earlier counter-revolutionaries on both sides of the Channel had resorted to a different theory to explain the French Revolution. Set down in the writings of a French cleric, Abbé Barruel, and James Robison, a Scottish professor, this claimed that a Masonic secret society established in the 1770s, the Illuminati, had engineered the events of the following decade. Its founder, Adam Weishaupt, was portrayed as the man who had brought down church and throne in one country and sought to topple them everywhere. Already in 1798 the claim was being made by a Congregationalist minister, Jedidiah Morse, that the Illuminati were trying to undermine the infant American republic, and the cry was soon taken up by others. It was not an antisemitic theory, but could be made so. Barruel subsequently extended his belief in a Masonic conspiracy to include a substantial Jewish element and, in the 1930s,

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Winrod and Coughlin adhered to both antisemitism and anti-Illuminism. For Winrod the ‘events starting in 1789 were only Illuminism in action’, and Communism was its contemporary manifestation. But ‘the real conspirators behind the Illuminati were Jews’. Coughlin, in addition to drawing on The Protocols, also believed that the Illuminati were seeking to destroy America.12 Gerald Smith continued this tradition after the Second World War. But just as the Illuminati conspiracy theory originally excluded any reference to Jews, The Protocols contained no reference to the Illuminati. They were different attempts to explain why nations were in danger and, during the 1960s, the two entered into bitter conflict. For the extreme right, the central feature in American politics was a racial struggle. In some forms this was simply a conflict between White and Black. But, as we have seen, in many cases, extreme rightists sought to claim that behind black demands was another and more dangerous enemy, a Jewish conspiracy. Yet to believe in a conspiracy against America need not entail antisemitism. The extreme right is part of a broader constellation of groupings, and we need other terms to understand how this might be characterized. For those who believe the nation is in danger from a conspiracy that is not racially defined, we will reserve the term ‘radical right’, while rightist conspiracism as a whole will be characterized as the far right. These distinctions could already be seen during the 1930s, but it was during the 1960s that the far right began to take on its modern form. Much of the radical right gravitated to the John Birch Society, formed at the end of the 1950s to resist the Communist conspiracy that it believed was increasingly gaining power in the United States. In 1961 its founder, Robert Welch, declared that ‘communist influences are now in almost complete control of our Federal Government’.13 Soon after, however, he began to argue that Communism was part of a wider conspiracy. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky—and De Gaulle—all served it, and to understand the ‘satanic’ programme to destroy government, religion and morality anti-Communists had to understand the role of the Illuminati. He began to use the term ‘Insiders’ to describe the force that sought to take power throughout the world, and in the early 1970s one of the Society’s leading authors, Gary Allen, elaborated on its explanation of the conspiracy. Communism, he claimed, was not a movement of the oppressed but one created by a superrich elite first to introduce socialism in different nations and then bring about a world government. Their instruments ranged from Lenin to Nixon, and once the United Socialist States of America had been established, the next step would be what the Insiders termed the ‘new world order’.14

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Allen’s inclusion of the Rothschilds among the Insiders drew allegations of antisemitism, and the Society itself included antisemitic members. But Allen argued that international bankers were both Jewish and non-Jewish: ‘Anti-Semites have played into the hands of the conspiracy by trying to portray the entire conspiracy as Jewish. Nothing could be further from the truth.’ As for Welch himself, in the mid-1960s the Society published a speech in which he suggested that antisemitism had been created as part of a Communist conspiracy. Unaware they were serving the Communist agenda, members were resigning from the Society complaining that it wouldn’t ‘fight the Jews’, and just as a Communist must have manipulated Ford into his antisemitic pronouncements, so there was no doubt that The Protocols had been ‘written either by Lenin or for Lenin to serve their purposes’.15 Welch’s theory that The Protocols had been forged by the founder of international Communism met with little support on the far right. Indeed, when in the mid-1990s the John Birch Society magazine published a special issue on the conspiracy, one of the authors was undecided whether The Protocols had been forged by Lenin or the Tsarist secret police.16 But it was not only those who believed that The Protocols revealed the truth about the Jewish conspiracy who disagreed with the John Birch Society’s insistence that it was a forgery. If in the 1930s far rightists saw the New Deal as the enemy, in recent years a new enemy has attracted their attention. In 1991, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the first President Bush declared that what was needed was a ‘New World Order’, in which nations should come together to achieve peace and security. Among far rightists, as we have seen, the term was already linked with America’s enemies and, in using it, they believed, Bush had revealed his role in the plan to destroy national sovereignty and bring about ‘one-world government’. However, where in the 1960s the leading force in fighting the globalist foe was the John Birch Society, more recently its leading opponents are often to be found in what has become known as the Patriot movement. Stretching from tax resisters to the militias to individuals who reject the legitimacy of the federal government and claim that they are ‘sovereign citizens’, this movement is strikingly diverse, not least in its attitude towards race. Some of its members are adherents of Christian Identity. Others explicitly identify with The Protocols, and one Patriot magazine, The Free American, in addition to reprinting the complete text of the pamphlet, has also published the lyric of a song by the Patriot folksinger Carl Klang:

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It’s the cause to the chaos that’s occurring in the land It’s the source of communism, it’s the global master plan . . . It’s the news behind the news and the methods that they use It’s the blueprint and the plan they all rely on And it’s written in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. 17 Another group, the Council on Domestic Relations, has republished a chapter of a book written by the veteran British antisemite Douglas Reed. Originally published in the mid-1950s, The Controversy of Zion declared that ‘the original Illuminati plans’ had proved, generation after generation, to be the textbook for revolutionaries, but it was The Protocols that gave ‘the entire picture of the conspiracy’. There was no proof that it was written by the Elders of Zion, Reed declared, but whether the authors were Jewish or non-Jewish was not crucial. Zionism and Communism were both attacking the West, and the methods they used had long been set down. 18 That the Patriot movement as such is not antisemitic is well demonstrated by some of the writings that circulate within its confines. In 1991, for instance, one prominent Patriot, William Cooper, published a book that declared that leaders of both left and right were Illuminists. ‘They are determined to win for themselves undisputed control of the wealth, natural resources, and manpower of the entire planet. They intend to turn the world into their conception of a Luciferian totalitarian socialist state.’ Some were members of the Jewish religion, but attempts to portray the Jews as ‘the cause of all our ills’ diverted ‘attention away from the truth’ and helped ‘the REAL conspiracy’. The book reprinted the full text of The Protocols which, it claimed, had come to pass in every respect, thus ‘validating the authenticity of conspiracy’. But while The Protocols were thus treated as authentic, Cooper warned that it had ‘been written intentionally to deceive’, so that any reference to Jews should instead be understood as referring to the Illuminati.19 In 1993 another book appeared that took a similar line. The author, Jeffrey Baker, a supporter of the leading far-right electoral grouping known as the US Taxpayers Party, argued that The Protocols laid down the principles of the Illuminati, which were diametrically opposed to the Judaeo-Christian values upon which the United States had been established. In the version of The Protocols translated by Victor Marsden, the Illuminati had been presented as a Jewish conspiracy. But this was ‘probably part of the coverup of the true intent. . . . If the blame can be laid at the feet of the Jews, then we will look no further.’ 20

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Such claims have failed to persuade those who defend the authenticity of The Protocols. One Identity group lamented that ‘many of our fellow Christian/Patriot/freedom-fighters’ had been deceived into believing that The Protocols were not a Jewish plan for world domination. It declared that there are only two possible reasons for Cooper’s claim. Either he had not adequately researched the topic or he feared the wrath of Jewish organizations. ‘From what we know of Mr Cooper, we pray it is No. 2.’21 But the theory of non-Jewish authorship, which the group abhorred, has continued to circulate. Indeed, despite its publication of The Protocols, the Free American has promoted arguments along these lines. One such publication, by a prominent Patriot named F. Tupper Saussy, was described as an ‘unavoidable touchstone for all future works on the subject of conspiracy’. Another, by the prolific conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs, was described as ‘masterful’ for the light it shed on the people ‘that rule our lives’. Saussy claimed that The Protocols was intended to turn people against Jews rather than the real group whose plans they laid out, while Marrs held that the antisemitic material in The Protocols had originated from Tsarist agents. But, he continued, the pamphlet might ‘reflect a deeper conspiracy beyond its intended use to encourage antisemitism, one hidden within the secret upper ranks of the Illuminati and Freemasonry’. 22 Nor are such arguments a new development on the American far right. One book, originally published in 1976, then reissued in a revised form at the end of the 1980s, discussed the relationship of The Protocols to the ‘Master Plan’ by which a small group of wealthy men sought to destroy ‘all existing political and religious institutions’. Many Jews were ‘involved in the Plot’, from Weishaupt to Marx to the Rothschilds, but the Illuminati, fearful that they were to be uncovered, had deliberately rewritten the plan to provoke charges of antisemitism so as to distract people ‘from the facts as they really are’. Authored by a veteran far rightist, Des Griffin, the book credited a writer of the 1950s, William Guy Carr, with discovering the Illuminati’s use of The Protocols to disguise the true nature of their plans.23 From its first appearance, The Protocols has played a central role in antisemitism. In the United States, however, where other conspiracy theories have long existed, the claim that it is authentic, and the counter-claim that it is false, have mutated in unexpected ways among those who see the nation in danger. For some antisemites, it can still be a forgery even though the Jewish conspiracy is real. But for others, while it is not a forgery, it is not what it seems. The plot they claim to have uncovered includes international bankers and Communists, but in this theory only those who have

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grasped that antisemitism is a deliberate attempt to obscure the identity of the true conspirators can really understand what The Protocols reveals and what it is intended to conceal. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

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Victor E. Marsden, Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion (London, 1933), 18, 20–2, 24, 27, 48. Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews. The Mass Production of Hate (New York, 2001), 129, 141–5, 340. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason. Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (London, 1971), 139. Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right. The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983), 63. Lipset and Raab, 160; Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation. American ‘Extremism’, the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, 1992), 57–8; Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse, NY, 1965), 206–7. Gustavus Myers with Henry M. Christman, History of Bigotry in the United States (New York, 1960), 365; Jeffrey Kaplan (ed.), Encyclopedia of White Power (Walnut Creek, CA., 2000), 347; Liberation, 20 January 1934; Tull, 193–7. Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith. Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), 107; Women’s Voice, 30 March 1950. Thunderbolt, January 1963; George Lincoln Rockwell, White Power (Reedy, WV, 1977), 244–5. Seditionist, Winter 1988; Nationalist Free Press, January 2002; ‘Nature’s eternal religion 1–19’, available at www.geocities.com/booknet07/ner/ner-1-19.html (viewed 22 April 2004). David Duke, My Awakening. A Path to Racial Understanding (Covington, LA, 1998), 463. Free Speech, November 1999. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1996), 30–6; David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy. Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY, 1971), 35–48; Gerald P. Winrod, Adam Weishaupt. A Human Devil (Clackamas, OR, 1937), 36, 43, 45; Lipset and Raab, 181–2. Alan F. Westin, ‘The John Birch Society’, in Daniel Bell (ed.), The Radical Right (Garden City, NY, 1964), 243. Jeansonne, 107–8; Davis, 327, 330–1, 333–4; Frank Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right. Race, Conspiracy and Culture (Westport, CT, 1985), 143; Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy (Rossmoor, CA, 1971), 35, 121–3. Mintz, 148; Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, Report on the John Birch Society 1966 (New York, 1966), 26–37; Allen, 39. New American, 16 September 1996. Free American, December 1997, October 2001. ‘Protocols: a chapter from the controversy of Zion’, available at www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/protocols.htm (viewed 29 April 2004). Milton William Cooper, ‘Behold a Pale Horse’ (Sedona, AZ, 1991), 74, 164, 267–332.

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20 Jeffrey A. Baker, Cheque Mate. The Game of Princes (Springdale, PA, 1993), 47– 53, 259. 21 ‘Description and notes on the “Protocols”’, available at www.possecomitatus.org/BeWise/descrip.html (viewed 29 April 2004). 22 Fr ee American, November 2002; http://enotalone.com/books/ 0066210836.html (viewed 13 April 2005); Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door. The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (New York, 2002), 202; Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy. The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (New York, 2001), 146–7, 152. 23 Des Griffin, Fourth Reich of the Rich (Clackamas, OR, 1989), 194–7; William Guy Carr, The Red Fog over America (Toronto, 1957), 1–8.

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RETELLING THE NEWS IN CENTRAL EUROPE Western Journalism as Democratic Discourse James Miller

During the 1990s the aid that came to Central Europe from the western media stressed the discursive elements of fact-based newspaper journalism. Donors strongly believed in a rather direct relationship between journalistic technique and the region’s democratization. There is reason to doubt this connection, and this paper explores it critically.1 Democratic journalism In the vast literature on the subject, there is general agreement ‘that freedom of expression and freedom of the press are indispensable elements of democracy’, and that the news media are unlikely ‘to lose their importance in democracy in the foreseeable future’. 2 Beyond these generalizations, however, there is much dispute. What, for instance, constitutes the proper functioning of the free press in a democratic system of government? Just how important is journalism’s contribution to democratic political processes? Most answers to such questions from the perspective of the field of journalism are highly normative. They tend to prescribe an idealized, even inflated role for the news media. A recent book-length articulation of occupational values, designed to help guide mainstream US news people, was written by two accomplished journalists turned journalism reformers, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. It begins with the following assertions: We need news to live our lives, to protect ourselves, bond with each other, identify friends and enemies . . . Journalism provides something unique to a culture—independent, reliable, accurate and

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comprehensive information that citizens require to be free. . . . The first [principle that journalists agree on] is that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing. . . . In the new century, one of the most profound questions for democracy is whether an independent press survives.3 While these claims may be debatable, there are reasons to believe that they represent the views of contemporary mainstream US journalists. The prominence of the authors is one reason. Another is that their book, The Elements of Journalism, resulted from a considerable effort to assay the state of American journalism, including numerous public forums, systematic surveys, interviews with journalists and content analyses of news reports. These assertions represent a contemporary response by serious journalists to the questions posed at the beginning of this paragraph. Perhaps the most famous American forerunner to Kovach and Rosenstiel appeared more than a half-century earlier. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, commonly known as the Hutchins Commission, published a list of the ‘five ideal demands’ of a self-governing democracy regarding news in the post-Second World War era. 4 The Commission was composed of ‘some of the foremost intellectuals and scholars in the United States at that time’.5 Journalism, it decreed, ought to provide: • • • • •

a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning; a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism; a means of projecting the opinions and attitudes of the groups in society to one another; a method of presenting and clarifying the goals and values of the society; a way of reaching every member of the society by the currents of information, thought and feeling which the press supplies.6 In meeting these demands, the Commission concluded: the press can do its duty by the new world that is struggling to be born. It can help create a world community by giving men everywhere knowledge of the world and of one another, by promoting comprehension and appreciation of the goals of a free society that shall embrace all men.7

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This high-sounding prescriptive approach to the duties of post-war journalism was shortly afterwards labelled the ‘social responsibility of the press’ by Theodore Peterson in the well-known monograph Four Theories of the Press. 8 A later analysis of the emergence of this particular sense of democratic journalism noted its historical importance: where media previously competed in the marketplace, now the marketplace is contained within the media. . . . The power of the press does not consist of promoting specific ideas or images; the power of the press is the ability of the major media to be the gatekeepers of the public sphere (emphasis added).9 Indeed, journalistic discourse itself had now become the rhetoric of democracy’s public conversation. The proper stance of the gatekeeper involves a curious political disinterest. Jay Rosen observes that American ‘journalists tend to see themselves as observers. . . . Almost all the key tenets in their ethical code emphasize detachment rather than participation’, such as objectivity, fairness and balance, separation between news and opinion, the watchdog role, the adversarial stance and ‘the injunction to “let the chips fall where they may”’ as the result of honestly reporting a story. 10 Finally, Herbert J. Gans’s recent sociological study, Democracy and the News, observes that ‘as a profession, journalism views itself as supporting and strengthening the roles of citizens in democracy’.11 Yet journalism’s notion about its place in democracy is ‘not written down’; it is ‘taken for granted’ by practitioners and is ‘not really discussed. The term democracy itself is only rarely mentioned in the indices of the major journalism texts.’12 Gans identifies four parts to this working formulation: (1) the journalist’s role is to inform citizens; (2) citizens are assumed to be informed if they regularly attend to the local, national and international news journalists supply them; (3) the more informed citizens are, the more likely they are to participate politically, especially in the democratic debate that journalists consider central to participation and democracy; (4) the more that informed citizens participate, the more democratic America is likely to be. 13 Taking these thoughtful observations into account, a brief answer to the question of what constitutes the proper functioning of the press in

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a democratic system, at least from the perspective of the American mainstream, might be this: journalists are non-partisan intermediaries between citizens and their government. Acting as independent professionals— which means that their first allegiance is to the ethical standards and craft skills of their field, not to their employers—journalists identify and report news that citizens need in order to govern themselves through such actions as voting, while at the same time keeping elected representatives informed of public opinion. Communist journalism The purposes and practice of the Communist journalism that dominated Central Europe for forty years were profoundly different. ‘In the classic communist model,’ as Milos Sukosd describes it, ‘exclusive party-state ownership, tight political control, institutionalized censorship, informal party directives and unbounded propaganda made the media instruments of communist parties’ ideological mass persuasion’.14 These were the basic media conditions that existed in Central Europe from about 1948 until the turning-point around 1989. Such a model, it is often claimed, flowed directly from Lenin’s famous injunction that newspapers should propagandize, agitate and organize their readers, exhorting them to create the new, utopian communist state. But Colin Sparks doubts the existence of a coherent Leninist theory of the press, arguing instead that the typical conditions described by Sukosd were developed by Communist ruling elites. 15 No matter how formal the theory, a Soviet journalism handbook unequivocally stated that ‘mass media are not independent, “autonomous” elements of the political system. Journalism is subordinate to the aims laid down for it by the political forces governing it’. 16 Few would disagree with Slavko Splichal, who called journalists under Communism ‘public relations persons for the state and the party’.17 The actual news produced under Communism was distinctive on at least two counts: its sense of newsworthiness and the language of its reportage. In Romania, Peter Gross observes, a prescribed, ‘wooden’ language robbed journalistic accounts of their ‘cognitive and expressive’ elements.18 Jonathan A. Becker, writing about the Soviet Union, comments on what he calls the ‘univocacy’ of Communist journalism: Words become so loaded with prescribed values that it is difficult for them to express ideas beyond accepted, official beliefs. Words to articulate criticism or to describe alternatives may simply not exist. . . . Those who attempt to criticize or challenge the ideology

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from within its own language structure end up conforming to the inner logic of the ideology, thus perpetuating it.19 News content in the USSR was expected to follow six principles: ‘party mindedness’, ‘ideological correctness’, ‘truthfulness’, ‘being for, by and close to the people’, ‘serving mass interest and allowing for participation of the masses’ and ‘criticism and self-criticism’.20 A Soviet journalist and journalism educator interpreted them this way: ‘News or information must pursue a definite goal: it must serve and support the decisions related to fundamental duties facing our Soviet society, our Soviet people marching on the road of gradual transition from socialism to communism.’ 21 As a result, the main East German newspaper might publish a story ‘to praise a local pretzel factory that exceeded its production quota’ or run ‘no fewer than 48 flattering photographs of communist party chief Erich Honecker on the same day’. 22 Similarly, certain news was to be delayed or avoided altogether. Paul Lendvai says, for example, that the ‘traditional way of informing the domestic public about a disaster, be it natural catastrophe or industrial accident, if a complete “blackout” of the news proves impossible, is the one announcement of the event itself, always with the additional sentence, that the “competent authorities have started an investigation”’.23 The regularized production of such news stories written in Newspeak required elaborate controls. In the Soviet Union, Becker describes complex pre- and post-publication censorship involving three departments overseen by the party’s Central Committee. There were meetings and directives, reviews of news material, lists of prohibited subjects; ‘published criticism, dismissal, imprisonment and even exile’ befell journalists whose work ran foul of authorities.24 In Hungary, Sukosd argues, censorship alone was a less important form of control. More significant were the deeply institutionalized factors. These included the nomenklatura system, which gave the several levels of the party the power to select journalists; informal interventions in the news production process, including direct telephone lines between party and editorial offices; secret police files; party control of journalism schools; and political terror, namely, the purges and show trials of offending journalists. 25 Overall, Communist journalism as practised in Central Europe during the Cold War differed fundamentally from its western counterpart. A Communist journalist was expected to act as a ‘communist fighter’, to be first and foremost a ‘party activist’, as Gross characterized Romanian journalists. 26 The entire system of news production—from preparing and

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advancing certain individual journalists and not others, to identifying potentially newsworthy subjects and choosing the language and structure to tell a news story—was explicitly politicized and centrally controlled. Its ‘organizing principle’, as Sparks puts it, was ‘conscious bias, by which is meant the knowing selection and construction of material in order to demonstrate a particular view of the world’.27 Media assistance After 1989 Western European and North American nations judged the formerly state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe to be ‘in transition’ to democracy. A principal foreign policy goal of the West became to assist in their ‘democratization’ through the usual forms of development aid, including, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, media assistance. Media assistance donors included the foreign aid agencies of national governments, supranational bodies, private foundations, media industry-related groups, academics and others. The most active organizations were probably American, British, Danish and Dutch, although the European Union and the Council of Europe, together with George Soros’s Open Society Institute, also played significant roles. Media assistance, most of which took place during the early 1990s, encompassed a wide range of interventions, such as the donation of equipment (computers, printing presses, radio transmitters), the rewriting of constitutions so as to encourage freedom of expression, instruction in media management (private ownership, advertising sales) and workshops on journalistic reporting and editing on the western model. It was a basic task of media assistance donors to replace Communist journalism with what they termed ‘factbased’ or ‘democratic’ journalism. According to this view, objective, impersonal news reporting that separated fact from opinion, identified multiple sources and followed the conventions of the mainstream western press were essential to the emergence of democratic self-governance in Central Europe. One priority was to support the emergence of democratic journalism in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Western aid intended to foster ‘free and independent media’ formed part of a category of assistance termed ‘democracy promotion’, which was itself an expression of what Thomas A. Carothers calls the ‘transition to democracy paradigm’. 28 Media assistance took on exceptional importance in the West’s promotion of democracy activities in Central Europe, after what some felt had been a long period of regrettable neglect. Involving as many as thirty organizations, a figure in the low tens of millions of dollars was probably spent on media assistance in the region during

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the 1990s.29 During that period democracy promotion became institutionalized in various ways, not least through organizations underwritten by the US government. The congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), set up in the early 1980s as the result of a USAID study, now publishes an academic journal, the Journal of Democracy, founded in 1999. It also administers the World Movement for Democracy, a ‘global network’ that meets every two years and provides database and newsletter information to advocate and strengthen democracy world wide; it also runs conferences and offers fellowships, among other activities (www.ned.org). There are similar organizations in Canada and Britain. One of the major media assistance organizations active in Central Europe and in the developing world is IREX, the International Exchanges Board, one of whose four current focus areas is the independent media. IREX offers ‘capacity building’ through the usual array of training and provision of media resources, and increasingly forms partnerships with European educational and other organizations. IREX’s funding comes from a variety of foundations and corporations, most significantly from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), USAID and US Departments of Labor and State (www.irex.org). Both IREX and the National Endowment for Democracy are located in Washington, D.C. International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have also, since the 1990s, become active in journalism training-related media assistance. In 1999 UNESCO founded Journet, known formally as the Global Network for Professional Education in Journalism and Media. Journet operates as a clearing-house for pertinent information and seems mainly oriented to the needs of developing countries (represented at its founding meetings were schools and associations in Kenya, Jamaica, Tunisia, Cameroon and Nepal, as well as Romania and the Czech Republic). One of its listed purposes is to ‘advance the cause of professional education for journalism and media, the development of appropriate and culturally sensitive curricula and the incorporation of professional experience in curricula’ (as defined on its website, www.journet.unesco.org). In 1990 UNESCO had recommended the establishment of a Central and Eastern European media centre in Warsaw and a training programme that included exchanges with western media ‘to improve professional skills and the qualifications of journalists and other media professions’, although it is not clear whether these recommendations were realized.30 Various international organizations and national governments (especially the US government) helped establish and fund the journalism programme of AiNova (Academia Istropolitana Nova) in Bratislava in 1999 and the

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Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management in Tbilisi in 2001. Both of these English-language programmes emphasize the practical aspects of western-style journalism. The New York-based Independent Journalism Foundation (IJF) was one of the first journalism trainers in Central Europe, and claims to have trained more than 500 media professionals and students a month. The IJF maintains centres in Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest, and has cosponsored (with the Freedom Forum, the Knight Foundation and various media outlets, including the BBC), ‘hands-on practical journalism’ training. A further significant player is the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), originally established in 1984 in Washington, D.C. as the Center for Foreign Journalists. The ICFJ trains and consults abroad and runs an exchange programme that places foreign journalists with US media. At one point it published a newsletter, CFJ Clearing House on the Central and East European Press, and in 1992 it administered the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) exchange that placed newspaper editors from Latvia, Russia, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria with small and large papers across the United States. The ICFJ runs the Knight Foundation’s International Press Fellowship programme, ‘a Peace Corps for journalists’ that selects experienced US journalists to teach fact-based journalism abroad. Their accounts are published in Knightline International, a slick quarterly magazine. The ICFJ also circulates the electronic ‘This Week in the International Journalists’ Network’, with information in English, Spanish and Portuguese about media assistance in Central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (www.ijnet.org). This organization also produces and sells books and videos that are intended for international training. They include Training Foreign Journalists: A Manual (‘a simple step-by-step guide for media trainers’) and Getting the Story: The Basics of Professional Journalism, Reporting, Writing and Editing (video, teacher’s guide and workbook). The ICFJ claims to have trained 17,000 journalists and managers in more than 170 countries. Its donors include numerous media industry foundations and individuals, USAID and the US Department of State (www.icfj.org). The World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) was founded as a news industry lobby group to oppose UNESCO’s New World Information Order initiative in the early 1980s. It continues today, claiming forty-four affiliates (mostly journalism associations) on six continents. In its mission statement, the WPFC emphasizes ‘monitoring and coordination, vigorous advocacy of free press principles and practical assistance

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programs’, including being a ‘watchdog for free news media’ at the UN and other international organizations. The WPFC claims responsibility for more than 200 training projects and has published several related books and pamphlets (www.wpfc.org). The mission of all these organizations was to serve as an antidote to the remnants of Communist journalism. For media assistance donors, the democratic function of journalism was inescapably bound up with the assumptions underlying mainstream journalistic practices in the West. This central tenet can best be demonstrated through the close examination of actual journalism training materials, exemplified by the Handbook for Journalists, first published in 1990. The Handbook for Journalists The WPFC, which produced the Handbook, made its case for news media assistance to Central Europe in another 1990 publication.31 This report, based on ‘in-country surveys’ conducted during the first months of that year in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, was funded by the Central and East Europe Press Aid Project, which in addition to the WPFC involved five other international press-industry organizations. The report begins by declaring that ‘if democracy is going to make it [in Central Europe], it seems obvious that free media must survive, and somehow, thrive’. It went on to argue that the western media ‘seem to have accepted that they have a moral obligation . . . [to provide] practical programs of direct material and intellectual assistance—[so] that the press in the new democracies does flourish, lest those democracies fail’.32 The goal would be news media that are decidedly unlike ‘a leading Solidarity movement paper that is often long on comment and opinion and short on information and facts’.33 In addition, media assistance must come from the western news industry, not from governments. Intervention must take place immediately, avoiding the ‘temptation to survey those problems over and over, to keep questioning the data’.34 The region’s many needs included learning, as one Polish journalist put it, ‘what it is to make a newspaper as a business’,35 and acquiring ‘the tools to do their jobs’, such as modern printing plants. 36 Crucially, the report claimed, ‘training provides the biggest bang for the buck’.37 The report closes with a short list of ‘doable’ projects. Most of its sixteen recommendations deal with training: twinning western and Central European newspapers, establishing a journalism school and libraries, reporting, editing and management training courses and issues seminars, a pool of western consultants, and journalists-in-residence. Also recommended was the translation, from English, and distribution of WPFC’s new Handbook for

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Journalists of Central and Eastern Europe, later retitled simply Handbook for Journalists. According to the European representative of WPFC, the Handbook enjoyed extremely wide circulation.38 More than 130,000 copies were published in many different languages, including Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian. This 160-page manual, whose twenty-eight chapters include excerpts from other publications, covers much ground, discussing newspaper and broadcast news and the business side of commercial media generally. Its purpose is fundamentally prescriptive, to teach the means to achieve ‘normal journalism’,39 specifically through the ‘normal’ story form of the ‘inverted pyramid’. 40 Its definition of ‘good journalism’, derived from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is: ‘Be fair, unbiased, accurate, complete, factual, professional, aggressive and compassionate.’41 It also highlights the need for ‘a good picture’, 42 and stories that are ‘arranged correctly’.43 The writing process is said to involve four steps, and there is a 24-item checklist to ‘find weakness in your writing’.44 There are a dozen or more ‘basic types’ of lead sentences.45 Fifteen tips are offered to achieve the successful interview,46 in addition to advising that the interviewer ‘be appropriately dressed, pleasant but businesslike’ and to ‘open with brief pleasantries’, while being sure to pronounce the subject’s name correctly. To mispronounce the name would ‘damage the interview severely’. 47 The Handbook comments that ‘the well written story does not require a lot of adjectives or adverbs . . . When nouns and verbs are spun together properly, sentences describe.’48 There is information about typical positions on a newspaper staff, how to cover a beat and considerable discussion of typography and layout, which ‘are predicated on two unchanging factors: the linearity of the Latin alphabet and the physiology of the human reading apparatus’. 49 Much of the Handbook is premised on the guiding principle that ‘everything begins with the reporter’ whose talent it is to ‘recognize news’ in the informational fragments that ‘hint the existence of a story’. The reporter’s essential skill is ‘to uncover facts that lie below the surface information’, feeling confident that ‘pure truth often emerges only over time as additional facts are discovered under reportorial probing’. 50 The fundamental message of the Handbook is summed up in the phrase: ‘Most editors say, “Give me the good reporter who knows how to dig out facts”.’51 Modernism and the fetishizing of technique Media assistance to Central Europe, as is clear from this account of the World Press Freedom Committee’s Handbook, has emphasized the training

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of fact-based journalistic techniques. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, both donors and mainstream journalists appear to believe that the principles of democratic journalism can be best realized by utilizing specifiable craft skills. In this sense, journalistic purpose and journalistic practice are inseparable. Second, the teaching of applied skills is a very concrete experience, one that can easily engage reporters and editors as instructors, that can produce tangible results for impatient students, that can be offered as a formula for professional success and as one of the preconditions for the achievement of democracy. However, this emphasis on technique has distinct limitations, since it contradicts a fundamental observation by one of journalism’s most astute critics, James W. Carey: Like all practices, those of journalists are contingent: that is, they are variable over time, place and circumstance. Nothing disables journalists more than thinking that current practice is somehow in the nature of things, that the practices nature and history determine were of the essence of journalism. Current practice is one variable expression of a continuously changing activity.52 Despite the self-assurance of media assistance donors, American journalism educators have long disagreed among themselves as well as with the news industry about how to teach journalistic technique to aspiring journalists. Formal university programmes of journalism education in the United States are at least a century old, but what to teach, for what purposes and in what relation to the rest of graduate and undergraduate studies remain unresolved questions. Recently Lee Bollinger, the newly appointed president of Columbia University, halted the search for a dean at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, perhaps the premier such programme in the United States. Bollinger, a distinguished First Amendment scholar and son of a newspaper publisher, announced that there is a ‘yawning gulf between the various visions of what a modern school of journalism ought to be. . . . To teach the craft of journalism is a worthy goal, but clearly insufficient in this new world and within the setting of a great university’. 53 The need for curricular reform at Columbia prompted him to add the warning that ‘we must beware of placing too much emphasis on the beguiling qualities of basic skills training’.54 The beginnings of the obsession with technique are usually located in the early years of the last century. Reflecting, in the 1920s, on the profession of journalism, Walter Lippmann complained that there is a ‘very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability

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or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist’s own discretion.’ He went on to argue that there is not a discipline in applied psychology [referring to journalism], as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist’s mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind. . . . His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot.55 The response of Lippmann and others to the rise of journalistic authority unaccompanied by professional discipline was to bring science to bear. The development of journalistic objectivity rested on a kind of scientific method of ‘gathering’ newsworthy facts and presenting them dispassionately. As Michael Schudson sums up this turn, journalists sought to ‘affiliate with the prestige of science, efficiency and Progressive reform’, thus disaffiliating from the public relations specialists suddenly in the employ of corporations and government, and breaking journalists’ historical ties to political parties.56 A ‘new style of prose’, realistic and supposedly objective, emerged along with ‘the self-conscious articulation of rules with moral force that direct how that prose shall be written’ in the form of occupational organizations and ethics codes.57 Rule-bound mainstream journalistic practice blossomed in the postSecond World War years, defined by Daniel C. Hallin as ‘the high modernism of American journalism’. Now American journalism’s professionalization elevated it well above the aimless subjectivity that worried Lippmann. Indeed, rationalized, objective news reporting ‘took on a role in this period which felt to most of those involved and which appeared to most of the society to be genuinely “above politics”’.58 Hence ‘politically, it seemed possible for journalism to be independent of party and state, and yet fully part of the “Establishment”’.59 It was, Hallin argued, ‘an era when the historically troubled role of the journalist seemed fully rationalized, when it seemed possible for the journalist to be powerful and prosperous and at the same time independent, disinterested, public-spirited and trusted and beloved by everyone’.60 The canonization of objective journalism through the linkage with modernism is apt on several counts. David Harvey, on whom Hallin draws in making this connection, notes modernism’s persistent metaphor of machine technology: language in poetry and fiction should have a machine-like efficiency, the design of objects and buildings should be unornamented and functional.61

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Other observers have described how the ‘calm, rational face’ of modernist visual design reordered American newspapers.62 Moves to a newspaper layout of ‘social mapping’ proceeded along with ‘the reallocation of cultural authority’ in advanced capitalist democracy. The ‘very shape of the newspaper, its division into sections, the mixing of text and graphics, hierarchical arrangement of items and sense of rhythm and texture’, 63 was guided by modernism’s keynote qualities: ‘rational, functional, premeditated, taming the mess by artifice’. 64 The mess being the stuff of the news itself: ‘weird, new and dramatic . . . in short, a jumble’.65 The neat, confident, cookbook-like instructions offered by the Handbook and similar materials employed in media assistance training programmes acknowledge none of this. The century-long debate about journalism education, the curious attempt to model imaginative social observation on the methods of scientific experimentation, the dreams of machine-efficient depoliticized cultural forms, including journalistic writing and newspaper design, the delusion that a journalist can be a well-rewarded resident of society’s upper reaches and still stand apart from them: none of these contradictions, paradoxes and conundrums is to be found in the fetishized techniques of media assistance journalism training. Conclusion This paper has shown that media assistance donors to Central Europe misplaced their emphasis on the training of journalistic craft skills as a principal means of introducing what they rather uncritically called ‘democratic journalism’ to post-Communist societies. There are many narrative choices in telling stories, even news stories, and there are few convincing reasons to believe that mainstream western news conventions are the most likely to contribute to democratic political culture. Other analyses have suggested that donors were insensitive to regional cultural and journalistic traditions, failed to involve Central Europeans as equal partners in designing and carrying out media assistance programmes, ignored the limitations of private ownership in an economically disadvantaged area, and tended to withdraw their aid after rather short periods of time. The problematic, self-aggrandizing myth of western mainstream journalism’s role in democratizing Central Europe demands close critical analysis, both because of its questionable claims to effectiveness and because it has become a model for export to other corners of the developing world. This paper wishes to stress what might be termed donors’ political-cultural arrogance, which confused a particular way of reporting the news with

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universal freedom of expression. Some of the consequences are explored in other chapters of this book. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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This paper is part of a larger project of fieldwork and research reports that has been supported, in part, by a fellowship from the Whiting Foundation and an IREX Short-Term Travel Grant. Special thanks to Mark Alleyne and Elizabeth Harries for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Karol Jakubowicz, ‘Media and democracy’, in Media and Democracy (Strasbourg, 1998), 10, 30. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York, 2001), 10, 11, 12, 13. Robert D. Leigh (ed.), A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago, 1947), 20–1. Jerilyn S. McIntyre, ‘Repositioning a landmark: the Hutchins Commission and freedom of the press’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 4, no. 2, 1987, 138. Leigh, 20–1. Ibid., 4. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Urbana, IL, 1956). John C. Nerone (ed.), Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press (Urbana, IL, 1995), 99. Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven, CT, 1999), 54. Herbert J. Gans, Democracy and the News (New York, 2003), 21. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56 Milos Sukosd, ‘Democratic transformation and the mass media in Hungary: from Stalinism to democratic consolidation’, in Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan (eds), Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2000), 122–3. Colin Sparks, Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media (London, 1998), 45–56. Jonathan A. Becker, Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States: Press, Politics and Identity in Transition (London, 1999), 20. Slavko Splichal, Media beyond Socialism: Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe (Boulder, CO, 1994), 69. Peter Gross, Mass Media in Revolution and Development: The Romanian Laboratory (Ames, IA, 1996), 24–5. Becker, 12–13. Ibid., 24. Paul Lendvai, The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News (London, 1981), 55. Everette E. Dennis and John Vanden Heuvel, Emerging Voices: East European Media in Transition (New York, 1990), 2. Lendvai, 57. Becker, 24.

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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Sukosd, 125–6. Gross, 13. Sparks, 43. Thomas A. Carothers, ‘The end of the transition paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002. For a further discussion of these issues, see James Miller, ‘Democratization and “fact-based” journalism: donor politics in East Central Europe’, paper delivered at the Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, 14–16 March 2002. ‘UNESCO activities to assist media development in Central and Eastern Europe’, UNESCO, Communication Division, Sector of Communication, Information and Informatics (Paris, 1991). Ronald Coven, Needs of News Media in Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C., 1990). Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ronald Coven, personal communication, July 2003. Malcolm F. Mallette (ed.), Handbook for Journalists of Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C., 1990), vii. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 21–2. Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 3. James W. Carey, ‘Afterward: the culture in question’, in Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (eds), James Carey: A Critical Reader (Minneapolis, 1997), 331. ‘President Bollinger postpones selection of journalism school dean’, 25 July 2002, available at www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/07/journalism_dean.html (viewed 14 April 2005). Lee C. Bolling er, ‘Jour nalism task force statement’, availa ble at www.jrn.columbia.edu/news/2003-04/taskforce.asp (viewed 14 April 2005). Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York, 1949), 227. Michael Schudson, ‘The objectivity norm in American journalism’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, 162. Ibid., 159. Daniel C. Hallin, ‘The passing of the “high modernism” of American journalism’, in We Keep America on Top of the World (London, 1994), 171.

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59 Ibid., 170. 60 Ibid., 172. 61 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, 1990). 62 John Nerone and Kevin G. Barnhurst, ‘Visual mapping and cultural authority: design changes in US newspapers, 1920–1940’, Journal of Communication, vol. 45, no. 2 (1995), 9. 63 Ibid., 10. 64 Ibid., 40. 65 Ibid., 39.

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MYSTIFICATION IN THE MEDIA FROM ‘RITUAL MURDER’ TO THE ‘WAR ON TERRORISM’ John Theobald

It was always an illusion that modern journalism would function as a true ‘fourth estate’ by acting as an enlightened antidote to abuses of power, and resisting the forces of collective identity formation and enemy creation that inspire racist or patriotic myths. Viewed historically, mass communications as a transforming force in our society and culture have failed to oppose divisive stereotypes as part of their ethical responsibility to promote international justice and social harmony. Indeed, notions of the media playing an essentially beneficial role have tended to distract publics and practitioners from underlying economic and political processes and structures that have promoted conflict. Yet there are persistent mainstream discourses that make optimistic claims, promoting the myth of benign intent and effect. These voices are often to be heard in the media themselves, enjoy support from allied industrial and political elites, and filter through into public consciousness. Media debates have resounded distractingly around these issues, ignoring the disastrous history of mass communications and promoting seductive dreams of an impending, globalized ‘information society’. Myths of the global village The concept of an information society implies that the technologies of satellite broadcasting and the Internet are creating a cosy global village whose population is electronically linked by shared processes of enlightenment. The nature of these processes remains vague, but it is assumed that they will lead to a future in which mass slaughter inspired by nationalist myths, the scourge of the twentieth century, will be seen as a primitive

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aberration. The developed world, according to this vision, is bringing about a revolution of the human spirit, as information flows freely along the superhighways. Microsoft, Newscorp, AOL-Time Warner (with its slogan ‘AOL Everywhere, for Everyone’) are creating a wired Utopia. This powerful marketing discourse is recounted to consumers by the world’s most powerful elites. Millions of participants in the developed world are allegedly reaping the benefits, while still more millions are invited to see this as a way out of their less developed status. After all, the more information you have, the freer you must surely be as a participant in this new democratic order. A critical view of these processes has been developed by the current generation of radical media critics, among them Armand Mattelart.1 For him, the industrial and political elites have exploited the potential of the information revolution for their own purposes, since it meets the systemic requirement for ceaseless economic growth and responds to the crisis of governability in western-style democracies. The information society forms both the source of huge profits for global corporations and an effective means of covert social control. Indeed, the dominant motives throughout have been power and profit, rather than public interest and the social good. These vested interests, he concludes, are incompatible with the building of a freer, more democratic society in which information and education are discursively constructed and disseminated for the benefit of the majority. The myths of the global village have been further reinforced by developments closer to home. In affluent households, large numbers of people use e-mail and the Internet as a daily resource that, within a generation, has come to be seen as indispensable. Moreover, almost everyone accesses radio and television, increasingly with the mesmerizing range of distraction provided by digital, cable or satellite reception. By purchasing and using these new media, we endorse them as sources of communication, information and gratification that improve the quality of our lives. It can be argued, however, that this involves a seductive form of false consciousness. Although we believe ourselves to be among the world’s most informed citizens, we tend to forget that we perch on islands of guilty prosperity amidst an ocean of poverty, injustice and despair. Absorbed by the facility with which vast quantities of information are being disseminated, we are not too concerned with world illiteracy statistics or the thought that a third of the earth’s population has no electricity, let alone radio, television or telephone. Technological optimism is embedded in prosperous lifestyles that blind us to the selectivities of mainstream information.

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Our myopia about manifest injustice and human misery is shaped by the screen of information and imagery that we acquire from media organizations, along with the benign image of themselves and their power elite allies that they propagate. These factors create the informed ignorance, self-serving consensus and easy passivity of media consumers that are the pillars of stable western governance. They promote the notion of an opposition between atavistic ‘nationalist myths’ and dazzling ‘modern media’ that is echoed in the title of this book. Nationalism is supposedly outdated and discredited, although still threatening revival, but technology is clean, credible and up-to-date. According to this model, the pre-modern socio-cultural ‘periphery’, source of sinister anti-social identities, can be contrasted with the consensual ‘centre’, incorporating rational, enlightened energies represented by mainstream politics, the media, and academia. Against this, it can be argued that the notion of benign media is a mythical construction and that the problem, historically and currently, is less the sinister so-called ‘fringe’ than the supposedly civilized ‘centre’. Furthermore, the forces of nationalism, racism and religious intolerance, far from forming an antithesis to enlightened modern communications, have always maintained a close and mutually sustaining relationship with them. Nationalism and the media, blood brothers throughout the murderous twentieth century, have triumphantly crossed the threshold into the twenty-first. Propaganda and war have been constant companions throughout the media age, as linguistically sensitive critics from Karl Kraus to George Steiner have recognized.2 Far from being an archaic remnant, the language of racial or national pride and political power remains disconcertingly modern, and the latest developments in media technology, invariably invented for military purposes in the first place, provide sophisticated channels for propagating divisive myths. This process was surely not inevitable. Responding to the determination of power elites to maintain and enhance their position, there has been a constant struggle by critical citizens to challenge and transform the balance of power. Looking at developments through another lens, that of critical media studies, we may arrive at a clearer view of these fundamental historical and cultural processes and of ways in which they may be resisted. In this paper, two examples have been chosen from the supposedly ‘liberal’ media to link the early era of mass-circulation newspapers with the television age, suggesting that there are underlying continuities. The first relates to debates about antisemitism at the turn of the twentieth century, the second to the ‘war on terrorism’ at the beginning of the twenty-first.

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Responses to antisemitism in turn-of-the-century Vienna It is through the writings of the godfather of radical media criticism, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, that press treatments of the Pisek ritual murder scandal of 1899–1900 come to our attention. The ensuing debate offers a paradigmatic example of the cynical instrumentalization of atavistic myths and the consequences of disingenuous attempts to refute them. While there can be no doubt about the crudity of the antisemitic campaign, Kraus shows that the intervention of the liberal press tended not to serve the interests of public information, but an ideological agenda backed by vested commercial interests. Mediaeval myths of Jews murdering Christian children and using their blood in Passover rituals were as alien to middle-class Viennese society at the turn of the twentieth century as they are to educated Westerners at the turn of the twenty-first. If, far away in some provincial town a poor Jew was arrested for the murder of a child, and local gossip whispered of ritual murder, this was, in terms of the journalistic standards by which it claimed to operate, scarcely a subject worthy of Vienna’s leading daily newspaper. We can let Kraus take up the story, citing material from the satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which he produced and largely wrote between 1899 and his death in 1936. This episode occurred during the first eighteen months of publication, prefiguring the comprehensive critique of the press that he was to develop in later years. Here he shows that the media stand as a barrier between consuming public and event, obstructing rather than facilitating an unadulterated access to information, perverting both fact and language in the interests of the financial profits and political advantage of the power elites to which the newspaper owners themselves belonged. Summarizing his position in 1905, Kraus wrote: Someone, was it Burke? called journalism the fourth estate. In his time, that was doubtless true. But in our time, it is actually the only estate. It has gobbled up the other three. The lay nobility says nothing, the bishops have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say, and says it. Journalism rules us. 3 The story behind the Pisek scandal was the murder of a girl named Agnes Hruza and the arrest and trial of Leopold Hülsner for the crime. This took place in a small Bohemian town far from the metropolis, and the Viennese press could by no means cover every murder in the AustroHungarian empire. But Leopold Hülsner was Jewish, and the antisemitic Deutsches Volksblatt seized on this story as a chance to pronounce Hülsner

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guilty of ritual murder. For Kraus, himself Jewish, such behaviour from the down-market press was beneath contempt. His attention only turned to the case when the Neue Freie Presse, the empire’s agenda-setting liberal newspaper, edited and largely staffed by journalists from Vienna’s assimilated Jewish minority, weighed in with vociferous denial of the ritual murder myth. On this basis the paper declared that Hülsner could not possibly have murdered the girl. As a result of this confrontation, the trial became not just that of Leopold Hülsner, but of the Jewish people, not just about the death of Agnes Hruza, but about the truth of the ritual murder myth and the credibility of antisemitic mythology. Mass meetings of middleclass Viennese Jews, addressed by a leading rabbi, declared their unanimous opposition to the ritual murder myth and their solidarity with Hülsner. This provoked further antisemitic tirades from the Deutsches Volksblatt led by a Catholic priest named Joseph Deckert. The Neue Freie Presse responded with articles ‘disproving’ the ritual murder accusations by Rabbi Moritz Güdemann. Reviewing this affair, Kraus took a characteristically independent line: The Deutsches Volksblatt raised the question whether the Jews customarily use Christian blood as part of their Easter festivities, and three thousand Jews under the leadership of Mr Güdemann invade the Musikvereinssaal in order to answer with an emphatic ‘Oh no we don’t!’ . . . If Deckert asserts, quoting impeccable sources, that ritual murders have taken place for however many centuries, Güdemann proves from the five books of Moses that as early as seventeen hundred years before the baptism of the first Christian, ritual murder was a thing of the past.4 The controversy both distracted from the facts of the case and influenced the outcome of the trial. It thus confirmed Kraus’s view that the political and financial agendas of the media not only obstructed the channels through which the public was supposedly informed about events, but actually changed these events. The Neue Freie Presse hired a leading Viennese lawyer to take over Hülsner’s defence, an intervention that, in Kraus’s view, merely served to convince the jury of a Jewish conspiracy to secure the release of a ritual murderer. This weighed more heavily than the dubious witnesses called by the prosecution to testify that they had seen shady figures at the scene of the crime and recount tales of blood being transported around the world. The jury, in Kraus’s words, ‘saw a defence lawyer who seemed to

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regard it as his one and only task to dispute belief in ritual murder. But for his client, Hülsner, it was a matter of indifference whether he was executed as a sex criminal or a ritual murderer’. 5 Hülsner was indeed convicted of murder, although the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment (he was released in 1918). The outcome of the case had been overshadowed by the media furore, and Hülsner, like his famous contemporary Dreyfus, ceased to matter as an individual, as the media discourse around the event eclipsed the event itself. Islamophobia and the ‘war on terrorism’ Despite advances in the technique, rapidity and alleged reliability of communications, there are striking continuities in the practices of discursive corruption and enemy creation by today’s media in support of the dominant political and commercial agendas. This has been spectacularly confirmed by the demonization of Islam following the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Pre-existing forms of racist propaganda are being adapted by the globalized wizardry of twenty-first-century communications technology. Despite disclaimers for the benefit of the humanist intelligentsia, Islam was, for mass audiences in the West, instantaneously promoted as the new public enemy, with Osama bin Laden branded as its embodiment, ‘wanted, dead or alive’. Comparisons with antisemitic iconography, and its exploitation in the early twentieth century, are inevitable. The image created in the public mind of Osama bin Laden, with his sallow skin, dark beard, gaunt features and prominent nose, combined with his biblical robes, is physically close to the traditional racist stereotype of the Jew. He is wandering, stateless, and leads a conspiratorial underground organization with its network of worldwide clandestine cells. He has secretly trained the members of these cells in treachery and sabotage. They live among us, but we cannot detect who they are because of their cunning and disguise. As in that notorious fabricaton, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they are presented as the hidden agents of a global conspiracy to take over the Christian world. Like the well-poisoners of antisemitic myth, they possess toxins that they illicitly spread in our societies. Fearful rumours begin to circulate, and totally unrelated crimes (like the Oklahoma bombing) are immediately attributed to them. Osama bin Laden himself is pictured lurking in his underground lair like subhuman vermin. He is a religious fanatic, but has connections with wealthy family dynasties who are supposedly on our side, but who are suspected of secretly funding his activity.

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Just as earlier the perceived actions of a few Jews were expanded to implicate, and then to persecute, entire Jewish populations, now the mythologized image of al-Qaida is used by political and media elites to incite hostility towards Muslims in general. As a result, there was only limited public concern in the ‘civilized world’ about the tens of thousands of Afghans who were killed and maimed as a result of the Anglo-US bombardments in the retaliatory war after 9/11. Nor is there much concern among our media-consuming public about the continuing loss of life from unexploded cluster bombs or the longer-term effects of the ‘depleted’ uranium dropped there. After all, the victims are merely Muslims. Likewise, the Iraqi threat could only gain credibility against the backdrop of belief in an anti-western Islamic conspiracy that, contrary to the evidence, placed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein side by side in the same ‘axis of evil’. One might expect that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which prides itself on its reputation for fairness and independence from government controls, would remain aloof from these crude forms of Islamophobia. It certainly avoided the blatant xenophobic rhetoric of the ‘patriotic’ press, led by the communications empire of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Indeed the Hutton Report, commissioned by Prime Minister Tony Blair, suggested that BBC reporters went too far in questioning the truthfulness of official British statements and the wisdom of government policies. But when we take a closer look at the BBC’s involvement in the decisive debates that preceded the invasion of Iraq, we find that it unequivocally aligned itself with the pro-American orthodoxy. The BBC’s contribution to constructing the Islamic threat between 2001 and 2004 was all the more problematic for being presented as ‘balanced’ reporting. While mechanistic parallels with antisemitic scandals a century earlier cannot be made, there are distinct continuities in the patterns of malign media intervention, especially in the processes of enemy creation as a discursive pre-requisite for violent conflict. Just as the Viennese press in 1900 colluded in the construction of an irreconcilable conflict between Christian antisemite and Jew, so BBC television’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama set up an artificial ‘clash of cultures’ confrontation between western/civilized anti-Muslim and Muslim. This is illustrated by the edition broadcast on 24 October 2001, six weeks after the Twin Towers attacks and during the bombardment of Afghanistan. Just as in 1900 there was a claimed, but bogus, intention by the media to elucidate a controversial subject, so this programme set up two apparently equal sets of

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debaters to discuss a falsely formulated premise. In 1900, the antisemitic press provoked its opponents into defending themselves against preposterous charges; in 2001, the representatives of Islam faced a barrage of crass abuse and spent their time answering inflammatory accusations rather than being able to explain their actual position. On both occasions, the protagonists were further apart at the end of the debate than at the beginning, and any enlightening pretext had been smothered by provocation and cliché. Both journalistic interventions nourished prejudice rather than neutralizing it and served the political agenda of those in the business of enemy creation. In 1900 the tragedy of a murdered girl was lost in a tide of polemic that served to feed antisemitic mythology and increase newspaper circulations. In 2001 a comparable crescendo of abuse was staged. The mainstream media colluded with government agendas for defining enemies in the ‘war on terrorism’, aiming at the same time to boost ratings by reducing a serious subject to crude sensationalism. Viewers may have been misled by the superficially balanced way in which the Panorama programme of October 2001 was set up. It seemed like a textbook example of the BBC’s scrupulously fair approach to a subject. Observing in the wake of 9/11 the confrontation between the western and Muslim worlds, the Panorama team used the most advanced communications technology to conduct a live debate between ordinary citizens in New York and Islamabad. The ostensible aim was to investigate the ‘clash of cultures’ and to serve as mediator in a process furthering mutual understanding at a ‘people to people’ level. The producers paid careful attention to demonstrating their formal fairness. A group of US citizens sat in New York, their contributions moderated by a white British presenter, Nicky Campbell. A group of Pakistanis conversed in Islamabad with Indian-born British presenter Nisha Pillai. The New York group could be seen as a carefully chosen cross-section, containing not only members of the white mainstream, but also US Muslims, people of colour, people from the peace movement and workers engaged in clearing up the ruins of the Twin Towers. The Islamabad group contained a balance of those classified as ‘moderates’, and those who had been involved in recent demonstrations. There was a manifest desire to ensure the representation of a broad range of opinion. As well as the discussion groups, the programme provided a balance of experts, one from the United States and one from Pakistan. In the studio in London was ex-British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. Anchorman was the senior BBC presenter David Dimbleby. As the programme developed, the debate alternated between New York and Islamabad, the experts had slots to make their comments, and

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Robin Cook was brought in to present the British standpoint. This was seemingly the BBC at its best, showing the positive democratic value of globalized mass communications technology by promoting citizen participation and democratic dialogue across continents. Yet a closer look reveals a different agenda, and shows that the programme actually functioned as a disguised propaganda exercise, a forceful assertion of US hegemony masquerading as fair debate. The ‘independent’ BBC was no more successful than the ‘liberal’ Neue Freie Presse in avoiding the dominant ideological polarizations. It betrayed the principle of impartiality by portraying Pakistani Muslims as propaganda dupes while conceding the Bush government’s claim that ‘those who do not support us are supporting terrorism’. Furthermore, far from promoting dialogue, it deliberately set up a ‘clash of cultures’, making sure that the West maintained the upper hand by allowing a verbal carpet-bombing of Muslim standpoints, and a rubbishing of views expressed in Islamabad, while not permitting an adequate response. The following analysis shows the underlying imbalance of the programme: 1 The opening sequence shows, on the one side, Bush and the New York discussion group of ‘typical Americans’, and, on the other side, Osama bin Laden and the Islamabad group of ‘typical Muslims’. Bin Laden is thus from the outset falsely associated with Islam in general, and the Muslim interlocutors in particular, a mendacious representation sabotaging conciliatory dialogue. 2 The choice of experts and discussion hosts betrays both desire for confrontation and use of hierarchical gender categorizations. The chosen US expert is the male, neo-conservative hawk Richard Perle; the chosen Pakistani expert is the unaggressive female diplomat Abida Hussein. This resulted in the uneven pairing of a bullying propagandist with someone who had come on to the programme to discuss the issues. While the New York host is male and bullish, the Islamabad host is female and constantly forced into defensive postures. 3 The series of contributions from the groups in New York and Islamabad both begin and end in New York. The New Yorkers are thus permitted both to set the initial tone and to have the final word. The aggressively anti-Islamic mainstream Whites, those least likely to want to listen to the views expressed in Islamabad, are repeatedly called on by the host. Of the sixteen minutes forty-five seconds allocated to

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the New York group, only one minute twenty-five seconds is allowed to the token peace movement representatives. 4 The experts’ interventions are dominated by the western side. Perle and Cook are allocated both the first and the last words, with their comments lasting for ten minutes, while Hussein gets only four minutes twenty seconds. Moreover in the first two of her three interventions, Hussein is cut off in mid-sentence by Dimbleby, whereas Perle and Cook (representing differing angles of the pro-western perspective) are treated with deference and are not interrupted. 5 Time allocations across the fifty-minute programme show 40 per cent allocated to the East, and 53 per cent allocated to the West. Thus a combination of editorial decisions made before the live transmission, and choices made during the broadcast, undermined the Pakistani side before the participants opened their mouths. Examples of the discourse used in the programme show the imbalance even more clearly. From the start, the sensationalist ‘clash of cultures’ scenario rather than any attempt at real dialogue is emphasized. US/western rectitude is set against presumed Islamic/eastern violence, envy, rage and self-delusion. In the opening sequence, Dimbleby praises Bush as ‘sticking to the bold war aims he set out from the start’, indicating qualities of determination, courage, decisive action and consistency. Following this, we are shown images of crowds of Islamic/Asiatic children burning an effigy of Bush. For the first visit to New York, Nicky Campbell, the discussion leader, has already lined up those with the most strident pro-US government ideas to launch the ‘debate’, Nicki Hayden and Lisa Ponte. He turns to them first, and returns to them repeatedly. They oblige with inflammatory ‘us and them’ generalizations. Asked to explain Islamic ‘rage against America’, their responses are replete with confrontational clichés (highlighted by means of italics in the quotations that follow): HAYDEN :

. . . It is our freedoms that we enjoy here, our many choices, and a misconception on the other side. PONTE : [egged on by the presenter] . . . they think our women are too liberated, our press is too free, our free market is not a system they ascribe to, so absolutely, they have it in for the American way of life. By the time the discussion switches to Islamabad, the bludgeoning antiIslamic tone has been set, and the Pakistani group is forced into reactive

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debate to deal with the falsehoods and stereotypes. They try to bring the debate back from confrontation and into genuine dialogue, but are not listened to by the dominating voices in New York. Back in New York, Lisa Ponte and Nicki Hayden are immediately brought in by the host: CAMPBELL :

Lisa, let me bring you in first. You may well not have got the right guy if they’re right in Islamabad.

The questioner again picks on a ‘clash’ issue, and the replies reveal markers of total certainty, belief in superior morality and intelligence, possession of truth and reality, and corresponding denigration of the Islamic others: PONTE :

Oh give me a break, Nicky. The evidence is beyond reasonable doubt . . . HAYDEN : We have a free press here in the US, unlike their country; we have it from all sides, the left, the right, the middle. They only hear it from al-Jazeera and the Arab [sic] sanctioned papers. Then Ed Koch, ex-mayor of New York, intervenes: KOCH :

I think that what they’re saying is so silly, it boggles the mind

Richard Perle, asked by Dimbleby if the US can win the war on terrorism without the support of Muslims, baldly declares: PERLE :

Of course we can. We’re going to defend ourselves against these sorts of attacks whether we have the support of the Muslim world or not. We are not going to fail to defend ourselves because someone in Islamabad is unconvinced. . . . If [bin Laden] has declared war on the West, then it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day if the people of Pakistan agree with that or not. He expresses only disdain for those whom the programme is ostensibly bringing into contact with him for dialogue, and his closing words capture the dominant tone of the US side of this supposedly constructive debate: PERLE :

I have sat and listened now to nearly forty minutes of rubbish, much of it from Islamabad. Unbelievably ill-informed people, perhaps because they don’t have a free and vigorous and open press, and access to information. . . . So I am really tired of hearing the

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ramblings out of Islamabad. If that’s the thinking in Pakistan, so be it. No rational argument. And certainly no change in American policy is going to convince people who think that the earth is flat. What went wrong? How could a ‘well-intentioned’ BBC programme be hijacked so that it achieved the opposite of what was supposedly intended? The answer is that the direction of the programme was predetermined by the framing, the order of appearance, the time allocations, the behaviour of the presenter in New York and, most evidently, the fact that Richard Perle, with his notoriously outspoken views, was invited to appear and given such a dominating role. This suggests that the BBC’s ostensible neutrality was merely a disguise for functioning as a mouthpiece for US propaganda. In the eyes of critical observers, the BBC may have long lost its credibility as a bastion of fairness, but it still manages to maintain a good measure of worldwide trust in its integrity. This programme was an example of its duplicity in the covert pursuit of powerelite agendas. Contrary to stated aims, a programme supposedly committed to dialogue served as a precursor for military conflict. Conclusion To identify the disastrous impact of media practices in this way, with their perverted association with nationalism, bigotry and associated wars and massacres, may appear exaggerated. It will seem so particularly to those convinced by the value systems and hierarchies, the notions of normality and balance that prevail in the global Potemkin village of mainstream media output. From the conformist perspective, criticisms of specific errors or even a series of misjudgements by the media may be permitted, so long as the errors are seen as the occasional departures from normal standards that are unavoidable in a democratic society. Systemic criticism, however, which points to the negative role played by the mass media as inherent in the prevailing economic and socio-political structures, is invariably dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’, when in fact no one using the phrase can define either the ‘conspiracy’ (as distinct from the habitual workings of power) or the ‘theory’ (as distinct from pragmatic observation). The two examples provided here are plucked from many thousands of possible others, and will only convince as part of a larger argument.6 The radical critical case rests on analysis of a mountain of circumstantial evidence from which repeated patterns of misbehaviour emerge at many different times and places. It is only as that case builds in public consciousness that real alternatives to current structures and practices will

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push their way on to the agenda. What is to be done? Ramonet, Mattelart and others are now calling for the global co-ordination of a fifth estate, a worldwide public sphere of journalists, citizens, teachers, academics and writers under the title Media Watch Global, which will act against the toxic contamination of discourse in the mainstream media, building on the valuable work of existing channels of criticism such as ZNet in the United States and Media Lens in the United Kingdom. 7 Kraus, in the first decade of the twentieth century, called for the pure water of authentic discourse to replace the eau de cologne of corrupt journalistic language, so that, as Steiner puts it, ‘word’ and ‘world’ are congruent with each other.8 Ramonet uses the analogy of food to call for ‘organic’ language and information to replace contaminated media discourse ‘that poisons the spirit and pollutes the brain’.9 Media-driven nationalism and xenophobia is one of the most virulent of those toxins.

Notes 1 Armand Mattelart, ‘Les laissés-pour-compte du cyberespace’, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2003, 1. 2 For a fuller account, see David Berry and John Theobald (eds), Radical Media Criticism. A Cultural Genealogy (forthcoming Montreal, 2005). 3 Die Fackel, no. 167, 26 October 1904, 12. 4 Die Fackel, no. 19, [early October 1899], 23–4. Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. 5 Die Fackel, no. 59, [mid-Novermber 1900], 1–2. 6 For a fuller account, see John Theobald, The Media and the Making of History (Aldershot, 2004). 7 See www.zmag.org and www.medialens.org (viewed 8 July 2005). 8 George Steiner, Real Presences. Is There Anything in What We Say? (London, 1989), 93. 9 Ignacio Ramonet, ‘Le cinquième pouvoir’, Le Monde diplomatique, October 2003, 1.

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HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE UNITED KINGDOM Michael Whine

Britain has played an important role in the publication and distribution of Holocaust-denial literature, and several of the early writers of denial tracts had work republished in the United Kingdom, where sympathetic printers were able to distribute it without the fear of the criminal sanctions that might ensue in Germany or France. These publications fall into three distinct types, which overlap historically. The first may be termed ‘pseudo-scientific’, since scientific arguments are used to substantiate the fraudulent claim that mass exterminations could not have taken place, as in the Leuchter and Butz reports.1 The second category takes the form of ‘crude’ denial literature, usually published as leaflets by small neo-Nazi groups, distributed in the street or sent through the post to members of the Jewish community and others with the intention of causing offence. A third category may broadly be defined as ‘political’ and includes the most recent and increasingly potent source, the Islamists.2 These types of Holocaust denial have been accompanied by significant developments in the media in which they are promoted. Early examples of denial propaganda were published in booklet form and sometimes had the appearance of scientific reports. But robust responses from the Jewish community forced deniers to take another tack, that of the mass distribution of offensive and often crude leaflets, particularly during the 1990s. Unlike the pseudo-scientific publications, which were often published under cover of fictitious academic publishing houses, the leaflets often boldly stated their origins. The groups that most openly engaged in this tactic were Lady Jane Birdwood’s British Solidarity organization, Combat 18 and latterly al-Muhajiroun (The Emigrants), an Islamist group. There was usually no attempt in these leaflets to persuade the reader by rational, if tendentious argument, since the main purpose was provocation.

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The British culture of freedom of speech made these developments difficult to resist. Until the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 and the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, the authorities were reluctant to prosecute in race hatred cases. These measures gave the police powers of arrest for the distribution of racist and antisemitic literature, and of immediate arrest without warrant for suspected racially motivated public order offences. A further landmark was the Macpherson Report of 1999 into the failure of the Metropolitan Police properly to investigate the killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, which resulted in a strengthening of efforts to combat racially motivated crimes. Even when there was a political will to prosecute, the Crown Prosecution Service sometimes lacked the legal ability to sustain a criminal indictment. However, a series of successful prosecutions of antisemitic leaflets and booklets in the mid-1990s put a stop to the widespread dissemination of Holocaust-denial material in this form. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the two most important political tendencies: the far right and the Islamists. It will be seen that the British historian David Irving has played a crucial role in the promotion of right-wing political agendas through his attempts to make the Holocaust-denial myth intellectually respectable, providing cover for cruder forms of propaganda. These developments have been resisted by a series of court actions, but the development of the Internet as a medium of mass communication has given a new impetus to Holocaust denial, since much of this material originates outside the United Kingdom. While the courts have successfully inhibited British-based incitements to racial hatred, the World Wide Web is being used to evade legal constraints. Far-right Holocaust denial The first major denial publication available in Britain was Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?, published in 1974 by the Historical Review Press. Widely distributed first in the United Kingdom and subsequently around the world, the booklet drew on the earlier publication by Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. As with several other subsequent publications, both the named author and the publishers were fronts for others. Harwood was Richard Verrall, a leader of the neo-Nazi National Front (NF), and the Historical Review Press was fronted by Robin Beauclair, a friend of Anthony Hancock, the son of a Nazi sympathizer who was imprisoned during the Second World War. The same hands were also behind Holocaust News, a broadsheet-like paper that drew on Butz’s earlier work and that once again was translated into several languages.

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Holocaust News was widely distributed in two different editions, being sent by post to Members of Parliament, academics, lawyers and members of the Jewish community in Britain.3 The Historical Review Press was also at this time republishing works by Butz, Thies Christopherson and Robert Faurisson, as well as acting as a distributor for the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR). In 1977 the same press republished The Six Million Reconsidered. 4 Thereafter they published a short series of Historical Fact booklets, which included Nuremburg and Other War Crimes Trials by Richard Harwood and For Those Who Cannot Speak by Michael McLaughlin, then leader of the neo-Nazi British Movement.5 A further landmark publication was Hitler’s War by the historian David Irving, which appeared in 1977, marking the start of his move towards open repudiation of the Holocaust. In this book he sought to deny not the mass murder of Jews, but Hitler’s initiation of it, blaming other Third Reich leaders for distorting Hitler’s real plan to relocate Europe’s Jews. Absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust was to prove one of Irving’s enduring aims.6 At the same time he publicly offered $1,000 to anyone who could provide documentary evidence of Hitler’s knowledge of the Holocaust, following it up with a letter to the satirical weekly Private Eye in which he claimed: ‘I have scrutinised every known record of the [Wannsee] Conference and there is not even a hint that Jews are to be killed.’7 From 1978 onwards Irving, who had political ambitions, began a series of visits to Germany to address meetings of far-right groups and war veterans. He continued to promote his thousand-dollar-challenge during the following years, while at the same time increasing his visits to Germany. In 1979 he also sought to challenge the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank, but after a lawsuit he withdrew a demand that Otto Frank (Anne Frank’s father) send the diary to London for forensic examination. In March 1979 Irving addressed the first of the Clarendon Club dinners on his researches and the conclusions he had drawn from them. This was a dining club of neo-Nazis and other activists that met in central London hotels, and that he also sought to use to launch a new far-right party. During the 1980s he continued to publish books on the Second World War and to address meetings in Britain, Germany and elsewhere. Although his books were now appearing on the booklist of the IHR, he hesitated to deny the central facts of the Holocaust.8 In September 1983 he gave his first lecture for the IHR at a convention in Los Angeles, still distancing himself from outright denial. In a newspaper interview shortly before he left for the United States, he is reported as saying:

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I’m doing it just for the fee . . . a five-figure sum in dollars . . . I know their [the IHR’s] reputation and the odours hanging around them. But I have never refused an invitation to speak to an audience, left or right. They may not hear everything they want to hear.9 The turning point came in 1989, when Irving launched Fred Leuchter’s pseudo-scientific Leuchter Report, which made the spurious claim that the absence of cyanide residues in the walls of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps proved that they could not have functioned as mass extermination centres. The Leuchter Report was published by Irving’s Focal Point Publications and printed by Anthony Hancock, the most active producer of neo-Nazi journals and related publications in the United Kingdom. Irving also hosted Leuchter’s sole London personal appearance at Chelsea Old Town Hall in November 1991, but the meeting was aborted after the police arrested Leuchter as he began to speak, deporting him the following day. This marked a turning point in Irving’s political campaign. He had met Leuchter initially as a fellow defence witness at the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada in 1988, and from then onwards he adopted and promoted Leuchter’s thesis, thereby destroying the vestiges of his scholarly reputation. In 1989 Irving also began to claim that the Red Cross Death Books, which had been released at that time, proved that no more than 74,000 deaths occurred at Auschwitz. He omitted to mention that the books covered only a brief period, while others in the series had been lost, so that they were of little relevance to the debate about the total number of victims. During 1992 Irving hosted three Historical Revisionist Seminars in London and embarked on several international tours. But by this time his activities were encountering legal obstacles, and plans for further trips had to be curtailed, following his deportation from Canada, banning from Italy, South Africa and Australia, and his failed appeal against a fine imposed by a Munich court and subsequent loss of access to the German state archives. He did however achieve publicity when the Sunday Times first commissioned him to translate and comment on the newly available Goebbels Diaries, before cancelling his contract on the basis that he had breached a confidentiality clause. The high-profile activities of David Irving provided supposedly respectable cover for cruder forms of propaganda. From 1993 onwards Holocaust denial in the United Kingdom embarked on its second phase, that of crude denial and vilification. In January 1993 hoax Chanukah cards, denying the Holocaust and containing anti-Jewish verses, were sent to

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hundreds of recipients. These were followed by other antisemitic mailings in the names of non-existent organizations, the most notorious being Jane Birdwood’s leaflet The Longest Hatred. 10 This was posted and handdelivered to hundreds, indeed possibly thousands, of Jewish homes. In the leaflet she claimed that the Holocaust was a lie and that there was a Jewish conspiracy to undermine society through control of financial institutions. The Canadian-born second wife of a recently deceased British peer, Birdwood had been an active anti-Jewish campaigner throughout the 1970s and 1980s, involving herself in the National Front and the more openly neo-Nazi British Movement. The most effective response took the form of legal action and, at her trial at the Central Criminal Court in London in March 1994 in connection with The Longest Hatred, she was convicted under the Public Order Act of 1986 for the possession and distribution of material likely to promote race hatred and sentenced to a three-month prison sentence suspended for two years. The sentence was non-custodial because of her age and poor health, and followed her conviction and conditional discharge the previous year for similar offences. Her third trial in 1995, in connection with the distribution of yet more antisemitic leaflets, was abandoned on the grounds that she was mentally unfit. However the distribution of The Longest Hatred opened the floodgates for other crude denial booklets and leaflets, including Holohoax, the comic book Tales of the Holohoax, and the Happy Chanukah from Yidneyland and Auschwitz: Have a Nice Day ‘greeting cards’.11 Among the most offensive were two publications by Combat 18, glossy booklets entitled Combat 18 Issue, No. 1 and Combat 18, Issue No. 3 containing crude anti-Jewish themes, outright denial material and photographs of Combat 18 members visiting Auschwitz, where several had climbed into the crematorium ovens. Police raids on leaders of this group led eventually to successful prosecutions and, in 1996 and 1997, William Browning and Paul ‘Charlie’ Sargent, who had been responsible for compiling and distributing the booklets, were convicted and imprisoned. Almost without exception the larger neo-Nazi groups promote Holocaust denial. John Tyndall, founder of the British National Party (BNP), published a propaganda sheet entitled Spearhead, and the BNP booklist contains many of the standard denial works, including those by Butz, Faurisson and Paul Rassinier. Its journals British Nationalist and The Flag also advertise denial books. BNP members were responsible for the mass distribution of Holocaust News and other such works during the mid1990s, but they ceased to do so after a change in leadership and the trial and conviction of two leading members, Nick Griffin (now BNP leader)

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and Paul Ballard, on charges of publishing an antisemitic magazine called The Rune. A witness for their defence was Robert Faurisson, who had been a frequent visitor to Britain. The National Front (NF), which was the largest neo-Nazi group in the 1970s, also played a role in promoting denial. Those responsible with Birdwood for writing and distributing offensive forgeries such as the Chanukah cards were mostly former NF leaders, including Trevor Malcolm Smith, whose trial in connection with the distribution of a wide range of antisemitic leaflets in 1996 was discontinued when the prosecution failed to offer evidence against him. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was Hancock’s Historical Review Press that was responsible for printing most of the denial material published in the United Kingdom, and he also printed material in other languages for export to Germany, Scandinavia and the Middle East. In 1994 his printshop was raided by the police in connection with the so-called Rudolf Report, a more sophisticated publication than its predecessors, which nonetheless employed similar techniques in attempting to prove by scientific analysis that the gas chambers could not have existed.12 Its author, a German citizen named Germar Rudolf, had a scientific background, but he was dismissed by his employers at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart when they realized he was abusing their facilities. Rudolf had links with both Hancock and Irving, the former publishing his report and the latter citing it in evidence in his civil action against Deborah Lipstadt. Rudolf was eventually forced to flee Britain following a German request for his extradition, and now resides in the United States. Although Hancock was not prosecuted for distributing the Rudolf Report, he faced criminal charges at the end of 2001 for the printing of other antisemitic material, but again escaped conviction. Holocaust denial by Islamists Although connections between the far right and Arab and Muslim states have been apparent since the 1950s, they have surfaced only intermittently with regard to denial activity. One of the first significant examples occurred in 1981, when British MPs were sent copies of The Six Million Reconsidered, an initiative financed by the Pakistan-based World Muslim League. Crude denial propaganda then began to be produced by Islamist groups, often targeting university students. In April 1994 Hizb ut-Tahrir (HUT, the Islamic Liberation Party) distributed a leaflet entitled Zionist-NUS Plot, criticizing a ban imposed on it by the National Union of Students. This leaflet asserted that ‘Jewish doctrine is purely racist claiming the Jews

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are the chosen nation and the rest of mankind are born to be slaves to this master race . . . They have made the world submit to them using the exaggerated Holocaust.’ 13 At a press conference prior to their Trafalgar Square rally the following August, HUT leaders again voiced their disbelief: ‘I do not believe in the Holocaust’, stated their leader Omar Bakri Mohammed.14 Another spokesman, Farid Kasim, added that he was ‘not satisfied intellectually that six million people were killed by the Nazis. Many people cast doubt about it. There are real things happening to humanity today and this only allegedly happened fifty years ago.’ Two years later members of HUT distributed leaflets entitled The Holocaust Is a Zionist Invention at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). HUT sympathizers also were responsible for distributing the IHR leaflet 66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust in London mosques and schools. 15 This new wave of Holocaust denial became linked with events in Israel. Leaflets distributed by the Society of Converts to Islam in 1998 set out a theme that was to be repeatedly heard in the following years: The public acceptance of the crimes of Israel has been manufactured by Europe’s imposed guilt about the alleged ‘Holocaust’. That is the fantasy figure of six million Jews being executed by the Germans during WWII, a quite amazing feat considering the fact that there were only three million Jews in Nazi occupied Europe.16 Other Islamist bodies promoting denial included the Hamas-linked Palestine Times, which in November 1996 reproduced writings by American Holocaust-denier Michael Hoffman II entitled The Terror Tricksters: The Zionist Chess Game of Incitement. The now defunct Muslim Parliament promoted denial directly through their meetings and publications and indirectly by promoting Roger Garaudy’s Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne and by providing a public platform for the Swiss convert to Islam, Ahmed Huber, who was active at that time in promoting Muslim links with the far right. Middle Eastern states, led by Iran, now became active promoters of Holocaust denial. The Iranian-funded Institute of Islamic Studies, based in London’s Maida Vale, sought to promote the French writer Roger Garaudy in 1998, and to host him as a guest lecturer at SOAS, before complaints to the principal led to the cancellation of his lecture. Yakub Zaki (formerly James Dickie, a convert to Islam), associate director of the pro-Iranian Muslim Institute, contributed denial articles to the Institute’s Crescent International and the Tehran-based English-language

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edition of Kayhan. In April 1998, at an al-Muhajiroun (AM) rally at Wembley, Zaki declared: They say the world owes them a debt, because six million of them died in the German concentration camps. Even Yad Vashem . . . have not been able to assemble more than a million and few thousand names . . . What did these people die of ? I can tell you. Nobody was gassed to death in the concentration camps . . . A few years ago, Fred Leuchter sent out a team of forensic scientists to go round Poland and examine these three concentration camps. One was the biggest of all, Auschwitz, the second was Majdanek, the third one, the name I have forgotten. They took samples from the walls of the so-called gas chambers . . . They took them back to their laboratory, then in Boston they analysed them. There wasn’t any trace of cyanide in any of them. The Holocaust, Israel is reared on a lie. The lie of the Holocaust myth . . . David Irving has the right idea, destroy the Holocaust myth and you have destroyed Israel.17 During the following years AM became the major promoter of Holocaust denial in Britain. In November 2000 its members put up posters throughout London advertising a meeting that referred to the Holocaust as ‘a perverted lie’. The meeting was cancelled by the hall owners, but in a press interview Omar Bakri Mohammed told the Jewish Chronicle: ‘To say six million died in the Holocaust is a fallacy used to justify Zionism. We believe that the Nazis killed about 60,000 Jews during the war. The story of the Holocaust is full of myths and lies.’ 18 In February 2001 AM issued a more defensive statement advertising a further meeting in London: The past week has seen the Zionist Jews campaigning to ensure that the ‘myth of the Holocaust’ is kept alive and that the world never forgets the claim that 6,800,000 Jews were killed by the Nazi regime in Germany. However, for the one that wishes to question such a ludicrous claim, they are subject to being labelled as ‘antisemitic or neo-Nazi’.19 Once again, the meeting was cancelled by the hall management. Similar themes were repeated in postings on Omar Bakri Mohammed’s website: How could Hitler kill 6,800,000 Jews when there was [sic] only 3,500,000 Jews living in Europe? This talk will trace back the lie of

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the Holocaust and show how it has been used to justify the ongoing Holocaust and genocide against the innocent Muslims in Palestine and to legitimise the existence of the Terrorist State of Israel.20 Muslim bookshops in London sell denial books, among the most popular being Anti-Zion by William Grimstad, and Arab Internet services based in London have likewise published denial material. Early in 2001 the following posting appeared on the website of Azzaman, an Arab-language newspaper published in London: The Holocaust, or the furnace that its inventors and propagandists claim had killed thousands of Jews during the Second World War, is considered in the mind of some historians and researchers as the biggest con in modern times as it was revealed later that many of its so-called victims were found alive either in Israel or in some South American countries, or even in Africa.21 The Palestine Times published an article in April 2001 entitled ‘Couldn’t Zionism lie about the Holocaust too?’, arguing that ‘anything said or written by the official Israeli-Zionist establishment, whether on Palestinian refugees or on “the only democracy in the Middle East” or indeed on the “Holocaust”, should be thoroughly doubted and questioned’.22 An eccentric individual who entered the field of Holocaust denial at this time was Alexander Baron, a former member of the British Movement who appeared to have forsaken his Nazi past and developed anarchistic tendencies, with links to the far right, Islamists and anti-Zionist Jews. He worked virtually alone and self-published a series of booklets in which the common theme was that Zionism exaggerated the Holocaust for financial and imperialistic ends. His Anglo Hebrew Publishing venture, and its associated InfoText Manuscripts, placed advertisements for his booklets in far-right journals and on the American Islamist MSA News website. 23 These developments show that, although the content of Holocaustdenial propaganda may be unchanged, its impact is being intensified through a medium far more powerful than the traditional printed leaflet, the Internet. Holocaust denial on the Internet The overwhelming majority of Net-based denial material originates outside the United Kingdom, although the nature of the medium allows

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universal access. It is in the United States that the Internet has been harnessed most effectively in the service of the deniers. Not only is use of the Net higher in that country than elsewhere, it is also the site of many of the most active deniers. The California-based IHR website and Bradley Smith’s Campaign for Open Debate on the Holocaust are perhaps the most influential denial sites on the Net, providing a veneer of sophistication by claiming that they champion free speech. But Middle Eastern sites are now becoming increasingly active. Recent entrants into the field are the so-called Arab world think tanks and some Arab newspapers. Both the Qatar government-linked Islam Website and the United Arab Emiratesbased Zayed Centre, until its closure, regularly promoted denial material.24 Examples in the Arab press are legion. A recently publicized example is the online interview given to the BBC by the al-Ahram-Hebdo (weekly edition) editor, Muhammad Salmawi, and its correspondent Muhammad Khalil, in which they asserted that no more than half a million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, while at the same time insisting that Israel was really behind the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center.25 Two other well-known denial sites are the Swedish Radio Islam site of Moroccan-born Ahmed Rami and the Australian Adelaide Institute site of Fredrick Toben. Neither now posts new material as a consequence of legal actions against them. The only British site regularly featuring denial material is the Final Conflict site of the International Third Position (ITP), a small national-revolutionary group that broke away from the NF. The ITP has advertised IHR conferences in California and championed the causes of Germar Rudolf and Pedro Varela, the Spanish neo-Nazi bookseller.26 The Usenet discussion groups alt.revisionism, alt.politics.white and alt.skinheads occasionally provide an outlet for British deniers, but again in fewer numbers than American participants. Conclusion Holocaust denial in the United Kingdom remains limited to the political fringes and seems unlikely to move beyond them. It has been promoted primarily by far-right groups seeking to absolve Hitler and the Nazis of their crimes. It is true that these groups, led by the BNP, remain politically active and that racist violence is still a feature of everyday life in Britain, particularly in the cities. However, political and cultural expressions of neo-Nazism are anathema to the majority of Britain’s population, and the British courts, striking a balance between the claims of free speech and the need to maintain public order, have successfully limited the scope of racist propaganda.

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The most spectacular legal defeat was self-inflicted: the failure of David Irving’s libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, which dealt the final blow to pseudo-scientific Holocaust denial. During the 1990s Irving was active in the legal sphere, attempting to silence his critics through the threat of legal action. In June 1996 he served a libel writ on British journalist Gitta Sereny and her publishers, Guardian Newspapers, for calling him a denier. The case remains unresolved to this day as a consequence of Irving’s failure to pursue it. He also commenced proceedings against Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin UK, over passages in her Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The case finally came to court in April 2000, and the proceedings were attended by Irving supporters from around the world, eager to see their propaganda vindicated. Although it was not history itself that was on trial, Lipstadt’s defence commissioned expert reports on the history of the Holocaust, the Nazis’ genocide policies and the use of Auschwitz as an extermination centre in the most exacting detail. The evidence presented in court and reported by the world’s media finally put paid to any scientific or historical notions of authenticity produced by deniers, and Irving’s arguments were dismissed as hate-inspired falsehoods. This decisive judgement, that destroyed Irving’s pretensions as a historian, had international repercussions. Rober t Faurisson complained that Ir ving had needlessly compromised their work in pursuit of his own egotistical imperatives. This opened up fissures in the campaigns of others bent on rewriting history in order to absolve the Nazis of their crimes, prompting several of them to seek refuge in the one area in which they still find support, the Middle East. The abortive attempts by the IHR and the Swiss denier Jürgen Graf to organize a denial conference in Beirut during April 2001, and the semi-public debate on the issues it raised in Amman the following month, possibly point the way forward for deniers, indicating where they may still find sources of encouragement and financial help. In Britain, by contrast, Holocaust denial finds virtually no echo in public life, despite growing attempts by Islamists to undermine one of the moral platforms for the creation of the state of Israel, that of providing a refuge for Holocaust survivors and other victims of antisemitism. The relative stability of the situation in Britain is linked to a distaste for foreign political extremism that can be traced back to the successful resistance to fascism. Moreover, the position of the courts has been strengthened by the passing of the War Crimes Act in 1991, which led to the prosecution of the war criminals Anthony Sawoniuk and Szymon Serafinowicz and the expulsion of Konrad Kalejs. These cases, widely

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reported in the media, brought home to a younger generation the horror that took place in Nazi-occupied Europe. Restitution claims against Germany, Switzerland and Sweden also received sympathetic media coverage. Further positive developments have been the inclusion of the Holocaust in the history curriculum of secondary schools, the opening of a permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the outreach work by the privately-funded Christian Beth Shalom Centre for Holocaust Studies, the Jewish community’s Holocaust Education Trust and the publication by Sussex University of an illustrated Teachers’ Guilde to Holocaust Denial on the Internet, distributed to all English state secondary schools. 27 Educational material for schools and funded visits to Auschwitz for history teachers and older children increasingly play an important role in passing on the memory. Finally, the inauguration by the British government in 2001 of an annual Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, supported by a range of educational and municipal activities, will ensure that the evils of the Holocaust are not forgotten. Notes 1

Fred Leuchter, The Leuchter Report (London, 1989); Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Chapel Ascote, 1976). 2 For an alternative approach to the typology of Holocaust denial, see Roger Eatwell, ‘The Holocaust denial: a study in propaganda technique’, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan (eds), Neo-Fascism in Europe (London, 1991). 3 Holocaust News No. 1 and Holocaust News No. 2, published by the Centre for Historical Review, PO Box 446, London SE23 2LS (the address was registered to the home of the British National Party activities organizer). 4 William N. Grimstad, The Six Million Reconsidered (Chapel Ascote, 1979). 5 Richard Harwood, Six Million Lost and Found, Historical Fact No. 1 (Chapel Ascote, 1978); Richard Harwood, Nuremberg and Other War Crimes Trials, Historical Fact No. 2 (Chapel Ascote, 1978); Michael McLaughlin, For Those Who Cannot Speak, Historical Fact No. 3 (Chapel Ascote, 1979). 6 David Irving, Hitler’s War (London, 1977). 7 Private Eye (London), 25 November 1977. 8 Hitler’s War, The Destruction of Dresden and The War Path are listed in Keith Stimely, Revisionist Bibliography—1981 (Torrance, CA, 1981). 9 Sunday People, 28 August 1983. 10 Inter-City Researchers, The Longest Hatred—An Examination of Anti-Gentilism (Acton Vale, London W3 [the home address of Jane Birdwood] 1991). 11 Holohoax, leaflet published by the Gentile Awareness League (1991); Auschwitz—Have a Nice Day!, leaflet published by the Hebrew Counselling Service (1994); Question: How Long Can the Jews Perpetrate the Holocaust Myth?,

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leaflet published by the Association of British Ex-Serviceman, PO Box 8, Ashford, Kent. Germar Rudolf (also known as Germar Scheerer), The Rudolf Expert Report (London, 1993), published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 118, Hastings TN34 32Q (a forwarding address). Zionist-NUS Plot, leaflet published by the HUT-linked One Nation Society (April 1994). Quoted in Susannah Cushworth, ‘UK Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders deny Holocaust took place’, Jewish Chronicle, 18 August 1994. Ibid. A Pro-Israeli World: The Result of a Conditioned and Un-thinking Public, leaflet published by the Society of Converts to Islam, PO Box 192, Slough, SL1 9YB (1998). Yacub Zaki, Wembley Conference Centre, London, 26 April 1998. ‘Muslims say Holocaust is a lie’, Jewish Chronicle, 24 November 2000. ‘Holocaust: Fact or Fabrication—Israel’s justification for killing Muslims’, alMuhajiroun press release, London, 2 February 2001. ‘The Holocaust—Israel’s justification to murder non Muslims’, available at www.obm.clara.net (viewed 31 January 2001). Azzaman, Arabic daily newspaper, vol. 4, no. 853, 21 February 2001. Khalid Amayreh, ‘Couldn’t Zionism lie about the Holocaust too?’, Palestine Times, available on the Media Monitors Network website at www.mediamonitors.net/Khalid3.html (viewed 11 April 2001). Advertisement for ‘New Revisionist Book’, available at msanews@msanews. mynet.net (viewed 19 February 2000). Examples, which fortunately proved ephemeral, included ‘The fabricated Holocaust of the Jews’, available at on Islam Web at www.islamweb.net/English/ article.asp?A=3911 (Islam Web is registered to the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, Dohar, Qatar); and ‘Zionist literature and Holocaust industry’, available on the website of the Zayed International Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, www.zccf.org.ae.e_PrinterPub.asp?pubid=95 (the Zayed Centre based in Abu Dhabi operates under the aegis of the League of Arab States). Kate Clark, ‘Interpreting Egypt’s anti-semitic cartoons’, 10 August 2003, available at the BBC News website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ middle_east/3136059.stm (viewed 14 April 2005). Revisionism in the New Millennium, advert for 13th IHR conference, Final Conflict, issue 1318, 29 May 2000; Germar Rudolf, Final Conflict, issue 1143, 22 January 2000; Pedro Varela, Final Conflict, issue 653, 16 December 1998. Rebekah Webb and Chana Moshenska, A Teachers’ Guide to Holocaust Denial on the Internet (Falmer, Sussex, 2000).

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THE BRITISH MEDIA AND THE FAR RIGHT Gerry Gable and Chana Moshenska

Supporters of the extreme right in Britain face a continuous dilemma. They wish to participate in mainstream political life, while at the same time promoting an extremist programme of racially exclusive nationalism. They can only obtain large-scale support by using respectable tactics, but they risk alienating their hard-core supporters if they play down their militant brand of nationalism. This contradiction places right-wing activism in a grey area between politics and criminality, and a striking number of the leading figures have been arrested and convicted for offences ranging from incitement to racial hatred to grievous bodily harm. During periods of political unrest, the extreme right adopt a respectable strategy, responding to discussions in the mainstream media about racial tensions or asylum-seekers. In such situations, the right can latch on to the discourse of ‘us and them’ and other supposedly patriotic themes. In addition, the far right distributes its own more explicitly racist literature, especially during elections. Currently the British National Party (BNP) is the most significant group playing this double game, and playing it with some success. It polled nearly 900,000 votes in the European elections of June 2004, although—unlike the more moderate right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which campaigned for withdrawal from the European Union—the BNP failed to secure any seats in the European parliament. The advances made by these two parties are partly due to their success in exploiting the hostility towards foreigners that permeates certain sections of British society. This paper considers what we can learn about the far right by studying its exploitation of the media, asking to what extent mainstream newspapers, radio and television contribute towards a ‘normalizing’ of racist prejudices. It also takes account of the efforts of anti-fascists, led

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by the journal Searchlight, to counteract these developments by creating a public sphere in which it becomes increasingly difficult simply to say: ‘We hate blacks’ or ‘We despise foreigners’. Changes in the law, especially the Public Order Act banning incitement to racial hatred, have increased the pressure on the BNP to maintain a respectable public face, but this has done little to alter the virulent racism of its internal communications, not intended for public consumption. By placing this dualism in historical perspective, the paper will trace the attempts of the far right to use the media with increasing sophistication for both national and local campaigns. The far right has done its best to keep up to date, making extensive use of the Internet and the international network of far-right music, in addition to their promotional literature, newspaper letter pages, radio and television interviews, and live talk shows. However, the attempt to market a respectable image is always at risk from undercurrents of violence. Patterns of prejudice: the early years There are underlying continuities, as well as significant changes, in way the extreme right has conveyed its ideas to the public during the past hundred years. At the beginning of the twentieth century one of the basic formulas was already visible: an uneasy alliance between mainstream newspapers and small-circulation hate sheets. Together they played a major role in mobilizing public anxiety and promoting legislation to restrict the waves of immigrants who were arriving from Eastern Europe. There is a familiar ring to the language used about Jewish immigrants in a report of 3 February 1900 in the Daily Mail: ‘They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English and asked for money for their train fare.’ Behind the scare stories, then as now, lurked the prejudices of the owners and editors of respectable newspapers. They were especially active after the Russian Revolution, promoting the myth that Jews were responsible for Bolshevism. At flashpoints in the 1930s there were already clear examples of the extreme right exploiting the ‘respectable’ strategy, reinforcing the mainstream media’s depiction of the current international crises with their own local analysis. The economic depression combined with the refugee crisis enabled right-wing agitators to claim that the ‘British way of life’ was under threat. They set out to infiltrate the mainstream newspapers, exploiting public hostility towards Jews and foreigners. Once again, the Daily Mail set the tone, writing on 20 August 1938: ‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an

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outrage.’ For a short period Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, even supported Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. There was widespread conservative support for Mussolini’s Italy, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany became the official policy of the Chamberlain government. The British fascists of the 1930s also produced large quantities of their own propaganda. Mosley was an early admirer of recorded speech and filmed interviews, even producing short documentary films about his movement. After the outbreak of war in 1939, the government felt compelled to act against potential Nazi collaborators, detaining a number of them under Rule 18b. But right-wing publications continued to appear, and towards the end of the Second World War the Mosley Book Clubs emerged as a focal point, rallying his supporters and calling for his return to political life. During the late 1950s and 1960s there was a revival of interest in Mosley’s publications, including glossy magazines such as The European, heavily influenced by Lady Mosley’s National Socialist sympathies. Right-wing propaganda entered a new phase in the closing years of the 1950s with the birth of small-circulation papers such as Black and White News, produced by the White Defence League, and Combat, the monthly newspaper of the original British National Party. The editor of Combat, John Bean, was a professional writer who today edits the current BNP’s monthly journal, Identity, as well as running a website hosting his personal thoughts. Combat was viciously xenophobic, attacking Jews, Blacks and Asians and even minority groups like the Maltese. The hate was underscored by a perverse humour that sometimes brought a wry smile to the lips of even its most ardent opponents. During the 1960s the extreme right reverted to the strategy of echoing the mainstream media’s depiction of current international crises with their own local activities. When in January 1965 a parliamentary by-election was called in Leyton, a working-class area in East London, it deployed a combination of direct action and ingenious propaganda. There was a high level of violence during the campaign, fascists threw a homemade bomb during an election meeting, and there was hand-to-hand fighting between anti-fascists and members of the BNP. Members of Colin Jordan’s newly founded National Socialist Movement also became involved. At the same time a strange series of letters began to appear in the local press. A person with an English name wrote a well-constructed letter to the local paper complaining about Asian immigrants flooding in and taking housing, jobs and benefits. The following edition contained a letter signed by a man with an Asian name, claiming that Britain had robbed his country in

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the days of empire. This was the reason why he had come here, to take something back for himself, his wives and his numerous children. Another letter-writer replied that this was an outrage against the British people, and then came a new twist. A letter signed by a man with a Jewish name and an address in Whitechapel declared that its author was terrified by the rise of the BNP, which reportedly had thousands of members in the East End of London alone. Consequently he was considering moving his family out of the country. Another letter, signed by someone from the BNP, claimed that the party had over 80,000 members in the country as a whole. At this point a deputation went to see the editor of the local paper, complaining that they had checked out the addresses on the letters and that none of the alleged signatories lived at those addresses. It turned out that all the letters had been the work of one solitary member of the less than 4,000-strong BNP, Teddy Ponsonby. From the seclusion of his bedsitter Ponsonby had churned out the entire exchange. This kind of fraudulent letter-writing was not simply a solitary effort, but much favoured by members of the BNP. This is a clear example of the tactics of rightwing agitators, who pretend to be ordinary people with understandable anxieties, using the language of the average person to mask their racist agenda. New leaders and new media After the formation of the National Front (NF) in 1967, television and radio started to take an interest in the extreme right: investigating, challenging and exposing its activities. However, there was no consensus about how to deal with it. The leaders of the NF took the view that any publicity was good for them, as they strove to build up their movement, but their use of the media depended in part on individual personalities. John Tyndall, the veteran fascist who led the NF during the 1970s, was a selfimportant person who felt ill at ease with the mainstream media, feeling he could be more outspoken in his own campaigning magazine, Spearhead, founded in 1964.1 By contrast, the NF’s national organizer, Martin Webster, a flamboyant man with an outgoing personality, enjoyed his dealings with interviewers and the press. The NF produced its own more explicitly racist publications, but they failed to reach a wider audience. John Bean had temporarily left the scene, and nobody in the NF was able to match his skill and success. At its peak in the early 1970s the NF had 17,500 members, and a total of 64,000 people may have passed through its ranks between 1967 and 1979. It declined rapidly after Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 general election on a strong right-wing and anti-immigration

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platform. The difficulty of combining racism with political respectability is illustrated by the outspoken NF publication, Bulldog, which was aimed at youngsters. It was so full of racism and incitements to hatred that its editor, Joe Pearce, a ferocious anti-Catholic, was jailed on two occasions.2 Bulldog carried the first published hit lists, which led to teachers being forced out of their posts and a journalist in Northern Ireland becoming the victim of an assassination attempt. It is ironic that Pearce, according to his own account, later converted to Catholicism and is now a leading right-wing author based at a college in the United States.3 The far right in Britain started to look for a new vehicle that could make its ideology more acceptable by finding new ways of responding to what its public wanted. Their most significant recruit was Nick Griffin, a Cambridge University graduate who is the current leader of the BNP. During the 1980s Griffin emerged on the farthest reaches of the far right with his Political Soldiers group, guided by his mentor and one-time business partner, the exiled Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore. Together with their former flatmate Michael Walker, a former Central London NF organizer, they attempted to put an intellectual face on some of their ideas. The publication of an occasional pseudo-philosophical magazine and the holding of some closed seminars in London were as far as they got.4 After the debacle of the 1979 general election, Tyndall worked with various far-right factions and disillusioned NF members to create the latest version of the BNP with himself as leader in 1982. Meanwhile, Griffin and his followers, under the guidance of Fiore, created turmoil within the NF, sacking Martin Webster, its most able officer, and pushing out any remaining members who adhered to the NF’s earlier principles. From the Political Soldier wing of the NF they evolved into the so-called Third Way, and then split again to become the International Third Position (ITP). Griffin later appeared to turn over a new leaf, spending the early 1990s trying to create a more plausible political style, writing about his ideas under his own name and several aliases. He even contributed articles on environmental themes to left-of-centre magazines, and he enjoyed a honeymoon period with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, after Rod Liddle became its editor in 1998. This programme, which had a tradition of exposing groups such as the BNP, gave considerable coverage to the controversial ideas of the far right, and in July 2002 Liddle even provided Griffin with a platform for his ideas at a Cambridge seminar hosted by the Radio Academy. As leader of the BNP, Tyndall’s policies included the slogan ‘Rights for Whites’, an import from the United States. He also promoted Holocaust denial in conjunction with his deputy, a former teacher named Richard

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Edmonds. Holocaust denial was not new to the British far right, for Martin Webster had moved into this area some years earlier while still in the NF, producing a virulent hate sheet under the title Holocaust News. This tactic, which revealed the antisemitism at the core of the far right’s activities, brought the BNP into contact with the most notorious British revisionist historian, David Irving, and the BNP arranged and stewarded meetings for him. Griffin was also involved, handling some of the security for the London rallies with fellow Political Soldiers. The BNP distributed Holocaust denial newspapers on a massive scale, devoting much of its income to this project, and callers were offered thousands of copies of denial publications free of charge. The Holocaust denial campaign led to closer contacts between the British far right and fascists from Europe and North America. The Internet now emerged as an increasingly important medium for disseminating their ideas, enabling them to target a new audience of younger people with stories about Jewish conspiracies and quasi-scientific reports designed to prove that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.5 Holocaust denial is scarcely a vote winner, although it strikes a chord with hard-core fascists. It was the Rights for Whites policy that won support for the BNP in East and South-east London, resulting in the party’s first significant victory in a local government election. In September 1993 Derek Beackon was elected to Tower Hamlets council in a by-election, causing consternation in the British media. The BNP had succeeded in exploiting a groundswell of popular resentment against the growing local population of Asian origin, coupled with genuine grievances over housing policy in the borough. Beackon, who was not a very convincing spokesman for the BNP, lost his seat in the full council election the following May as a result of more effective campaigning by mainstream parties. Despite this temporary success, Tyndall failed to exploit the interest being shown in the BNP by the British and international media. The staff of Searchlight had to field hundreds of enquiries about the ‘revival of fascism’ from all the national newspapers, dozens of local papers and major television news outlets in Britain, also receiving enquiries from as far away as Japan. The response of Searchlight was to ask, ‘what revival?’, and the media interest soon faded. Beackon’s ideas were ridiculed in broadcasts by BBC South East TV News and Radio 4, while a number of investigative television programmes, both regional and national, chipped away at the BNP’s credibility as a political force. This is an example of the far right failing to use the media opportunities available to them. The mainstream media were looking for a story, but the far right was too divided

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and disorganized to take advantage of this. However, the Tower Hamlets episode revealed inter-ethnic tensions that were later to provide a fruitful hunting ground for racist agitators. The movement was further weakened by tensions between Tyndall and Griffin, his rival for leadership of the far right. While Tyndall was moving towards a repudiation of his earlier Nazi sympathies, Griffin wanted to copy the more intellectual far-right parties on the continent, yearning for a BNP that was reputable and modern, consisting of men in suits with wives and children. In 1996 Tyndall handed over the editorship of Spearhead to Griffin. The magazine, which was personally owned by Tyndall, had survived the Greater Britain Movement, the NF and now the BNP. However, Tyndall was reluctant to hand over the leadership of the BNP to Griffin, and a protracted conflict ensued. The first phase ended after Griffin, having become party leader, expelled Tyndall and was then forced to reinstate him, an exercise that cost the BNP several thousand pounds. The control of BNP publications became a vital element in the power struggle. Tyndall resumed the editorship of Spearhead and used it as a rallying point for his supporters. But Griffin, once in charge, set about modernizing the BNP. The more sophisticated publication, Identity, became the official party monthly magazine in place of Spearhead. Griffin also embraced the electronic age, setting up websites so that not only BNP members but anyone who was interested could download the BNP’s views on controversial subjects. The BNP’s website recruits supporters, highlights supposed injustices to ‘British’ people and offers the opportunities to buy goods. Griffin’s image of British nationalists with trendy suits and personal computers might suggest that the party had become respectable at last. But the BNP was still playing a double game, and it is important to recall the statements made by Griffin in 1996 as editor of an antisemitic magazine entitled The Rune.6 In an attempt to advocate community-based politics, he wrote: The electors of Millwall did not back a post-modernist Rightist Party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.7 Such statements reveal the duplicity of a political strategy that tries to combine smooth public relations with residues of hard-line fascism.

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Riots, elections and television probes The series of inter-ethnic riots that occurred in industrial towns in the north of England in May and June 2001 gave the far right a new lease of life. At a rally in Oldham shortly before the first riot occurred, a local BNP organizer greeted party officers from around the country with the words: ‘Welcome to Oldham, the front line in the coming race war.’ A cover design for Griffin’s monthly magazine Identity pictured flames over the names of various British towns, indicating the BNP’s strategy. Some places had already fallen foul of the BNP’s plots to set them ablaze; others on the list had not yet burned, but were to do so soon after publication. The subsequent trials of white rioters in Oldham and Burnley proved that the BNP and its members had been actively promoting and organizing the disturbances. However, some local newspapers reported the riots as if they were merely battles between two rival gangs, one white and one Asian. In Oldham several issues of the local paper, the Oldham Chronicle, almost directly promoted the hopes of the BNP in the 2001 general and local council elections. An editorial of 11 June 2001 argued that the political landscape in Oldham had been ‘changed through the proper democratic process by Mr Nick Griffin and his British National Party campaigning properly and legally’. Since there was no mention of Griffin having been convicted in 1998 for inciting racial hatred, it was not surprising that the Anti-Nazi League accused the editor of ‘pandering to the Nazis’ and that there were protests by the Asian community.8 The BNP proved quite adept at exploiting resentments about the numerous ethnic minorities in an increasingly multicultural Britain. In April 2001 a white war veteran, Walter Chamberlain, suffered a serious assault by a gang of Asian youths. Photographs of his battered face, as featured in the local press, were used to drive home the party’s message in numerous BNP leaflets, newspapers and magazines, as well as neo-Nazi websites. It turned out that neither Chamberlain nor his family had given permission for use of the photograph and he wished to make it known that his attackers were just violent young thugs, and that race was not an issue. This has not deterred various fascist groups from circulating stickers and leaflets showing his picture. The BNP was indeed now attracting national media attention, although responsible editors began to adopt a more critical attitude towards the BNP in the run-up to the council elections of May 2002 and 2003. A BBC Panorama investigation screened on 25 November 2001 with the title ‘Under the Skin’ revealed that members of the BNP had criminal records and were politically dishonest. In 2002, Channel 4 screened a televised documentary entitled Young, Nazi and Proud, which

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featured Mark Collett, organizer of Young BNP. This revealed his racism and his worship of Nazi Germany, showing him to be unfit to work with young people. Griffin’s initial response was to suspend Collett from membership with a promise that he would hold an internal tribunal to expel him from the party. True to form, the BNP equivocated and Collett was soon reinstated as an official of the party and by 2004 as a candidate in the elections. The fortunes of the BNP peaked in May 2003, when it succeeded in having a total of thirteen new councillors elected. However, it has only won two by-elections since that date out of over a dozen it has contested. This is partly due to further hostile news coverage. Media pressure intensified as Searchlight worked with the BBC on a documentary entitled The Secret Agent, exposing the party’s covert activities. This programme was to be screened ahead of the local, London and European elections of June 2004. The conduct of elections is strictly regulated by British law, and the BBC was wary of breaching protocol by showing this programme ahead of the vote. Both Searchlight and the programme-makers argued in favour of the public’s right to know, but the BBC took legal advice, expecting to be advised that it would be wrong to broadcast the programme before the election. Counsels’ opinion was that the programme contained evidence of something like eleven criminal offences and that it should be screened in the public interest. In the event, the BBC decided not to show the programme until after the elections, in which (as we have noted) the BNP attracted substantial support. When The Secret Agent was screened on 15 July 2004, one month after the elections, the evidence it presented resulted in six leading members of the BNP being arrested on criminal charges. The party was dealt a further blow by a documentary called Dead Man Walking, which featured Matthew Collins, a former NF official from South London and an activist with the more violent elements in the BNP in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who went on to be a mole for Searchlight, monitoring the activities of far-right organizations. Further revelations followed in July 2004, when Collins was the subject of one of the BBC’s Hard Talk interviews, conducted by Tim Sebastian. These programmes— and the debate they engendered—have had a disastrous effect on the BNP’s hopes of being regarded as a legitimate political party. Problems of presentation Given that their product is fundamentally flawed, it is hardly surprising the BNP has problems of presentation. The history of its attempts to develop its own press department abounds in absurdities, and it has never

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found a spokesman as articulate as Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former broadcaster who fronted UKIP’s successful campaign in the European elections of June 2004. Just before Griffin took over the leadership of the BNP, Michael Newland, a long-time right-winger from Camden in North London, was appointed the party’s press officer. It was he who developed the BNP’s media response unit, which started off by offering carrots to a hungry press, but later took to castigating anybody who said anything bad about the party. Newland was replaced by a man calling himself Dr Phil Edwards, whose real name was Stuart Harling Russell. When the BNP was winning council seats, Russell could afford to be nice to the media, cultivating the editors of major regional and local newspapers and radio stations. By 1 May 2004 there were seventeen BNP councillors nationally, including a defector from the Conservatives in Calderdale and an independent councillor who joined the BNP in Stoke. But, despite the BNP’s claims of a massive increase in membership, the reality was that in May 2004 membership was still below 6,000. During the first few months of 2004 Russell changed his tune, phoning sceptical journalists and insulting them. One editor reported that he had been abused on the phone after writing an editorial suggesting that readers should give the BNP a miss at the ballot box in a forthcoming local by-election. The BNP entered the June 2004 elections in a position of relative weakness, and the party decided to ban its candidates from giving any interviews before the close of nominations. Russell was challenged by Steve Boggan, formerly a senior reporter at the Independent and now a freelance journalist, who had been commissioned to write a two-page feature for the London Evening Standard about the BNP and its prospects at the June elections. Boggan and Russell had a long meeting, during which Russell spoke frankly about his beliefs, admitting that the BNP really stood for hatred of Blacks, Jews and indeed democracy. After Russell’s remarks had been quoted verbatim in the Evening Standard article, he appears to have been hurriedly replaced as press officer, at least in London, by Richard Barnbrook. This political spokesman also seems to have problems with his real name, which switches between Barnbrook and Brook. The reason may be that he is a schoolteacher and that publicity about his political activities might harm his professional standing. One explanation for the friction between the BNP and the media lies in the assumption that in Britain the leading newspapers and broadcasting stations are controlled by Jews. Griffin explained his views in the 1990s in a book called The Mindbenders, which listed names of those he regarded as Jews, many of whom were in fact not Jewish at all. Michael

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Grade, who is Jewish, was approached towards the end of his tenure as chief executive of Channel 4 Television by a deputation asking him to ban the 1997 BNP election broadcast. Like many others in broadcasting he thought there was a legal obligation to screen the BNP’s views at election time, however obnoxious they might be, provided the party fielded at least fifty candidates. In reality no such legislation exists, and as he was clearing his desk, he did indeed issue an order not to screen the BNP broadcast. Other channels insisted on cuts to remove identifiable black and Asian people from the programme, and when the BBC showed it unedited, they received thousands of complaints from viewers. The BNP’s difficulties are compounded by the increasingly effective campaigning of anti-fascist groups. During the 2003 local elections, Searchlight produced half a million copies of a twelve-page tabloid newspaper exposing the criminality and hatred of the BNP. In 2004, with backing from the trade unions and democratic political parties, the magazine produced and distributed 1.4 million copies of a similar paper during the run-up to the elections. Election rules make this kind of campaigning a complex task, but the fact that the June 2004 local council, London and European elections were held on the same day made it easier for organizations to campaign against the BNP independently of other political parties. The Internet is now one of the most important battlegrounds. For several years the far right was at the forefront in developing a large international structure of websites. When the authorities responded to complaints from anti-fascist groups by closing a website down, neo-Nazis could have new sites up and running within hours. Since British law, particularly relating to Holocaust denial, is more permissive than that of certain continental countries, there have been a number of examples of neo-Nazis moving to Britain, especially from Germany, so as to be able to continue their activities. One well-known far-right website, specializing in Holocaust denial, was based at Uckfield in East Sussex until its founder, faced with the threat of deportation, fled to the United States. This paper has addressed the attempts of the extreme right to campaign for electoral support while advocating the kind of racist nationalism that appeals to their fascist sympathizers. Their use of the media has evolved in response to the changing political climate in Britain, and the variations in their media savvy have had a direct impact on their electoral success. By contrast with the crudity of the BNP’s earlier activities, Griffin’s relationship with the media, especially the use of his image as a Cambridge-educated gentleman farmer, represents an attempt to create a respectable front in the hope that this positive image will rub off on the

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rest of the party. However, since the party’s fundamental ideology is unchanged, its strategic dilemma remains unresolved and, as its leader, Griffin continues to risk arrest on suspicion of incitement to racial hatred.9 The situation was summed up in an article in the Guardian on 3 August 2004, which reported that the current debate within the BNP still relates to the tension between the far right’s need for a respectable public face and the rank and file’s desire to be overtly racist. To win large-scale support they need to work through the democratic process, but they risk losing their hard-core support if they accept the constraints of mainstream politics. Notes 1 This monthly magazine took its name from the paramilitary group Spearhead, of which Tyndall and Jordan were leading members. Both of them had been imprisoned for its activities in December 1962. 2 See the report in Searchlight, January 2002. 3 Joseph Pearce is Professor of Literature at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and author of studies of Christian literary figures. In his autobiographical article, ‘Race with the devil. From the hell of hate to the well of mercy’, 2003, he recalls his extremist views during his time in the National Front, his prison sentences and his conversion to the ‘Holy Mother Church’, available at www.catholic.com/thisrock/2003/0305fea2.asp (viewed 9 July 2005). 4 Griffin, Fiore and Walker also founded an organization called Heritage Tours, based in Walker’s flat. An investigation of Heritage Tours in Searchlight exposed Griffin’s connection to Fiore in 1984: see Northamptonshire Racial Equality Council, The British National Party. A Briefing, January 2004, available at www.northamptonshirerec.org.uk/news/BNP.pdf (viewed 9 July 2005). 5 See Rebekah Webb and Chana Moshenska, A Teachers’ Guide to Holocaust Denial on the Internet (Falmer, Sussex, 2002); see also Searchlight’s website at www.searchlightmagazine.com. 6 The Rune had started out in the Croydon and Surrey area and was run not only by BNP members but also by members of what was known as the Surrey Border Front, which included former members of the extreme British Movement, activists of the terror group Combat 18 and quasi-intellectuals. Under Griffin’s guidance it grew into a glossy magazine and was much more open about its hate than Spearhead. The result was that Griffin and his colleague Paul Ballard were sent for trial under the race hate sections of the Public Order Act. Ballard pleaded guilty; Griffin fought the case and lost, receiving a suspended prison sentence. 7 For information about ‘When the crunch comes . . .’, published in The Rune i n 1996, see ‘The BNP—democracy and elections’, available at www.searchlightmagazine.com/stopthebnp/uncovered/pg05.htm (viewed 9 July 2005). 8 In May 2001 the offices of the Oldham Chronicle were firebombed, allegedly because of its biased reporting about the Asian community; see ‘The summer

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of rebellion: CARF special report’, August/September 2001, available at www.carf.demon.co.uk/feat54.html (viewed 9 July 2005). Today the Oldham Chronicle is thoroughly anti-BNP, even though the party tried to pressurize the paper by threatening its advertisers with a boycott of their companies. See Guardian, 9 September 2004. 9 Most recently in December 2004. See the report ‘BNP leader arrested over incitement to racial hatred’, Independent, 15 December 2004, 2.

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STRANGERS IN OUR MIDST Letters to the Editor in a Swedish Local Newspaper Bo Petersson

How does a local, small-town newspaper discuss subjects pertaining to refugees, immigrants and the effects of foreign influences in a local setting that witnesses very few conflicts with migrated groups? The author intensively followed a local Swedish newspaper, Smålänningen, during the whole of 2002, and so gained good insights into the sentiments and undercurrents of the local community in the town in question. That town was Ljungby, situated in the southern part of Sweden, with approximately 27,000 inhabitants in the municipality as a whole. Smålänningen has a totally dominant position in the municipality. Over 70 per cent of the households are regular subscribers to the newspaper. Furthermore, according to the estimates, the paper reaches 88 per cent of the population of Ljungby on a daily basis, which is certainly a very high figure.1 This article seeks to demonstrate that rather unremarkable texts, in this case letters to the editor, may tell us a great deal about our own times, since they function as mirrors of the age in which they are written. The undercurrents explored in Smålänningen throughout the year 2002 are deemed to be indicative of prevailing views among the majority population about immigrants and refugees. Learning more about them may fulfil important early-warning functions. Why local news media? The media provide the crucial building blocks of most people’s visualization of the world. They construct and maintain certain visions of reality.2 More specifically, the media constitute permanent sources of information and points of view about minorities. 3 The media are the arena in which notions of nationhood and constitutions of in-groups and out-

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groups are most visibly constructed,4 and they constitute ‘an especially rich site’ for the study of phenomena such as national identity and nationalism. 5 To a large extent the media serve to ‘constitute our perceptions and definitions of social reality and normality for purposes of a public, shared social life, and are a key source of standards, models and norms’.6 They reproduce and maintain hegemonic social relations, reinforce prevalent distinctions between in-groups and out-groups and, by the same token, strengthen notions of what is to be considered normative as far as membership of different collectives is concerned.7 But why should local newspapers be studied? Are they not losing their significance in an age in which televised news and Internet sources take centre-stage in meeting the news preferences of the consumers? I would tend to answer both yes and no to this question. Yes, because the audience obviously tends to rely on television news and the Net for global media events. Opinion polls conducted in the United States indicate that 70 per cent of respondents rely on television for their daily consumption of news.8 To be sure, most readers would certainly not turn to the local media for updates on national events. However, concerning local news, it is a different matter. Readers do turn to local media for local news. 9 Daily newspapers constitute the most important source for their readers’ informationgathering about the local community, and local newspapers are as a rule highly trusted by their audiences.10 In small-town settings, like the one we are researching here, the local media hold a particularly strong position in the community, precisely because they, in contradistinction to national newspapers, focus exclusively on local news.11 They do what they are good at, and they are rewarded by their readers for prioritizing local news.12 In this study the news media are regarded as having dual roles: they are constrained by societal discourse at the same time as they influence it and contribute to defining its main tenets. They reflect their environment at the same time as they construct and reconstruct it.13 Media constitute an arena at the same time as being a crucial actor within it.14 They are social institutions integral to the society in which they operate,15 and the influence that the surrounding society brings to bear on them cannot be ignored. They are part and parcel of society at large, and it is not meaningful to see them as constituting a separate island, subject only to its own rules. Whatever the prevailing debates about issues such as immigration and multiculturalism are, they will be represented and reflected in the media. In this study we are dealing with mundane texts that tell us little out of the ordinary. Indeed, it is the ‘unremarkable’ texts that may tell us most about our contemporary times, since they function as mirrors of

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the age and time in which they were written.16 I concur with Wayne Brekhus’s argument: ‘In failing to take the ordinary as seriously as the extraordinary, social science has produced a distorted picture of the social world.’ 17 As Julia Kristeva put it, ‘it is precisely the commonplace that constitutes a commonality for our daily habits’. 18 Indeed, the everyday world can be viewed as a ‘paramount reality’.19 By analogy, Brekhus suggests that studies of the religious practices of only modestly religious people may provide insights more applicable to broad social studies than research on more pronouncedly religious groups.20 If related to the fields of nationalism and collective identity, it is indeed in many respects the banal nationalisms and their manifestations that tell us most about the characteristics of nationalism in general.21 According to a widespread metaphor, daily newspapers constitute a public forum in which political discussions are held and politics actually made.22 They form a discursive space in which political agendas are constituted and (re)figured.23 News media unquestioningly play an important role when it comes to setting or, at the very least, influencing these agendas. They can thus be considered important players in the arena that they themselves constitute and co-construct. This is even more pronounced for the local news media. Being active in the community, local journalists are expected to be committed and to proclaim a stance. For the most part, the media serve to reinforce and consolidate views that are already prevalent in society. Fundamental beliefs about the world and individuals and groups acting in it are established during one’s upbringing, education and early professional life. The mass media tend to take over from the early influences of ‘school, parents, religion, siblings and companions’.24 Most people are likely to derive their beliefs from channels other than the media, but the media have an important role in convincing their readers that their preconceptions are justified and in some sense true. It is fair to say that individual, fairly non-dramatic news items rarely change views that are firmly established and entrenched. As maintained by Colette Guillaumin, it is rather a matter of a ‘slight oscillation around fixed points’.25 This is not to deny, however, that ‘the cumulative effect of many stories over a period of months or years may nonetheless be large’.26 What is in the making here is the influence through subtle means that Michael Billig has written about so astutely. 27 Certain matters and distinctions are taken for granted and thus accepted as true. One wellknown and prominent example of this is the division of the world into ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ and the concomitant subdivision of the newspaper

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into pages dealing either with domestic or international news. As readers we have become so accustomed to this order of things that more often than not we tend not to question it at all. And so, the daily newspaper contributes to the delimitation of the national as well as the local discursive space, geographically as well as mentally.28 Thus, the local newspaper can profitably be seen as a discursive marketplace in which prevailing thoughts and ideas are displayed, negotiated and exchanged. These are, consciously or not, passed on by their new adherents to other members of the community. Given such a perspective, the letters to the editor section is of substantial interest. The average reader is given the floor, but with certain restraints. The contents of the letters are still partly formed, or at least reined in, by the editorial policy of the newspaper. Too blatant letters will simply end up in the dustbin. All in all, the letters section comprises an interesting blend between private thoughts and public debate, between everyday discourse and mediated discourse. 29 We will now turn to the letters section of Smålänningen during 2002, a year in which there were lively debates about immigration, multiculturalism and their implications. The letters to the editor section: a virulent debate Little out of the ordinary happened in Ljungby during the year of 2002. What took place by way of drama was at least not due to tensions between the majority population and migrated groups. However, readers of the letters to the editor section could easily gain a different impression. The debate there was high-pitched and discussions intense. According to the polls conducted by Smålänningen itself, the letters to the editor section was among the most widely read sections of the paper. Whereas the familyrelated pages were the most popular by far (76 per cent), the letters to the editor scored very highly with readers, who placed it in third position (54 per cent), only barely overtaken by the pages devoted to radio and television (56 per cent). This made the letters section even more popular than the news pages devoted to Ljungby itself (52 per cent).30 It is therefore reasonable to assume that the letters to the editor have some impact on the audience, even though readers may not immediately sympathize with all the views expressed. The views propagated in the letters section will make their way into the living rooms of the readers to quite a different extent than for instance the markedly unpopular editorial page.31 As a consequence, pertinent questions may arise regarding what should be seen as the ‘true institutional ideology’ of the newspaper on certain topical issues. It does not matter much whether the editorials of the paper on

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issues pertaining to refugees and asylum-seekers are liberal in character, and argue the case of having a generous and open-ended policy on these matters, if sections that are more widely read, including the letters page, tell a different story. 32 This was exactly what happened in Smålänningen during 2002.33 The appeal of the editorial page of Smålänningen was further limited by the fact that the editorials are actually written in faraway Stockholm, whereas the remaining parts of the paper are produced locally in Ljungby.34 On the issue of immigrants and refugees, the letters section was probably the site in the newspaper where events in the national political arena were most clearly translated into a local context. The first time this happened was during the early months of the year in connection with a highly publicized event in which a young woman, living in the Swedish city of Uppsala, was shot dead by her father, who had ostensibly tried to defend the honour of the family in view of her choice of partner. The name of the woman was Fadime, and her tragic death was widely reported both inside and outside of Sweden. She became a powerful symbol of young women caught between the traditional patriarchal views and sentiments of their families, and the emancipating attitudes of their new country. In a comment made after the murder of Fadime, a representative of the emergency centre for women in Ljungby claimed that ‘what happened to her might just as well have happened here’ (Sm, 24 January 2003, 4).35 The Fadime case was taken up by several writers of letters to the editor. One recurring theme was that the Fadime murder pointed the way to the future of a multicultural Sweden. One writer predicted that the murder should be seen as ‘a mild dress rehearsal’ compared to what might happen in a future Sweden in which Islam had securely taken root and sharia laws had become accepted by Swedish judicial bodies (Sm, 11 April 2002, 22). The claim that the introduction of sharia laws into the Swedish legal system was being advocated by Muslims in Sweden was also brought up elsewhere in the debate (Sm, 26 March 2002, 24). Another voice, ostensibly that of a concerned old-age pensioner, expressed alarm that ‘inhabitants of our country who by tradition have other values than (so far) the majority of the Swedish people’ were prone to commit murders of honour and rapes. The writer envisaged a future in which he/she had to lock him/herself in so as not to be ‘mugged or beaten up or maybe murdered’ by immigrant youth gangs (Sm, 25 July 2002, 22). A prolific letter-writer with ties to a xenophobic fringe party, the National Democrats, asked polemically whether one really deserved to be branded a racist

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just because one was opposed to ‘imams who wish to cut people’s throats or bury women from the waist down in the ground and stone them to death’ (Sm, 16 May 2002, 21). As a counterpoint, the Fadime case was raised also by people promoting more liberal ways of receiving and integrating immigrants into Sweden, even though this category was less frequently represented in the letters section. Prominent representatives of the regional chapter of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) argued, for example, that had there been better and more fruitful contacts between the native Swedish population and the immigrants, cultural clashes like the one leading up to the murder of Fadime might have been avoided (Sm, 4 April 2002, 17). However, during 2002 it was the impending general elections that provided the backdrop of the most intense debate devoted to immigration issues in the letters section. In what seemed to be a concerted action one writer asked to be enlightened by other readers concerning the ‘true costs’ of immigration for the Swedish taxpayers. He said that he had seen as widely different estimates as 30 billion Swedish crowns per annum and 250 billion per annum (Sm, 21 May 2002, 15). In a letter about three weeks later another writer advocated the higher figure, arguing that the Swedish government had ‘put the lid on the discussion’ so that the public would not ‘interfere’, and if somebody still did, he or she could always be written off as ‘racist or xenophobic’ (Sm, 12 June 2002, 23; 26 June 2002, 26). The moderate estimate of 30 billion crowns per annum was rejected out of hand; such an estimate was dated and far from complete, it was argued (Sm, 26 August 2002, 23). In early July, another letter-writer claimed to be able to provide the answer to the original question, thereby referring to a recent book by a certain Lars Jansson, ostensibly a lecturer at Göteborg University (a search in the Göteborg University staff directory revealed no one with that name and position). In his book the total cost of immigration to the Swedish national budget was estimated to be 267 billion per annum. According to Jansson’s argument, the costs had tripled during the last decade of the twentieth century. The skyrocketing costs, the argument went on, had to be paid by the Swedish public through cuts in expenditure on health care, education, law and order, communications and old-age pensions (Sm, 4 July 2002, 20). Jansson entered the debate himself some weeks later, largely repeating the message (Sm, 23 July 2002, 21). Later on during the summer he maintained that the economic benefits offered by the state made Sweden an attractive country for immigrants, and that less than 10 per cent of those accepted had ‘legitimate reasons for asylum’. Surely, most of them

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tried to escape from poverty and unemployment, but this did not mean that they could be regarded as refugees. According to Jansson, the Swedish government and its ‘supporting parties’ amounted to ‘the best friends of the human smugglers’ in Europe, most of whom were ‘foreigners or former foreigners’. Finally, he claimed that 600,000 immigrants after all had jobs in Sweden, and that these people squeezed out Swedish welfare and put downward pressure on wages for those already poorly paid (Sm, 20 August 2002, 21). According to writers adhering to the same views, the responsibility for the all-too-liberal Swedish immigration policies had a face, namely, the minister of integration, Mona Sahlin (Sm, 25 September 2002, 26). As one writer of a letter to the editor chose to phrase it, the current policies were the fault of ‘Mona Sahlin and her like-minded social acrobats’ (Sm, 15 August 2002, 22). The national pre-election debate of 2002 was to a large extent dominated by the People’s Party, a liberal party traditionally associated with a generous outlook on policies of immigration and asylum, as well as on issues like developmental aid. During the summer of 2002, the party leader Lars Leijonborg made a partial volte face, as he started to stress that benefits had to be combined with demands on the immigrants. Among other things, he suggested that citizenship be made contingent on a minimum threshold of knowledge of the Swedish language. Certain achievements in linguistic tests should become a criterion for being granted Swedish citizenship. Critics claimed that the message was very hard to combine with the liberal views normally associated with the People’s Party, suggesting that the party was trying to exploit darker sentiments. However, the electorate responded positively to the reorientation of the party, which had stunning success at the polls. The pros and cons of linguistic tests came to constitute a part of the debate in the letters section. Jansson, for one, saw the merits of the suggestion, even though he thought that it was ‘banal’ and that it was made thirty years too late. Despite its innocence, he claimed, it had caused an ‘uproar in the media and among politicians, especially on the left wing’. All in all, he held it to be ‘self-evident’ that even permanent residence permits had to be made contingent on linguistic skills. Thus, he went markedly further than the People’s Party (Sm, 20 August 2002, 21). Other writers, too, praised the perceived reorientation of the People’s Party, even though it was seen to be repentance in the nick of time (Sm, 6 August 2002, 15; 15 August 2002, 22). In one letter Leijonborg was advised to study the policies advocated by the leader of the populist Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, had he not done so already (Sm, 6 August 2002, 15).

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During the summer, champions of liberal ideas on immigration rallied to defend their values on the letters page. One writer argued that immigration had, seen in a historical perspective, on balance been a profitable affair for the Swedish national economy. It was only in the 1990s when Swedish asylum policies turned more restrictive, he went on to argue, that it turned unprofitable for the state. Even so, he maintained, Jansson’s figures were grossly exaggerated (Sm, 11 July 2002, 21). He defended the lower ‘true cost’ figure of 30 billion crowns annually, citing a study by a well-known professor at Växjö University (Sm, 11 July 2002, 21; 21 August 2002, 23). A Green Party representative of the municipal assembly of Ljungby also entered the discussion. She asked rhetorically why immigrants did not get the jobs they applied for, and, if they did, why their wages were so much lower. The current treatment of asylumseekers risked giving rise to covert everyday racism, she argued (Sm, 8 August 2002, 13). She also claimed that the political debate on achievements in linguistic tests as a criterion for gaining citizenship smacked of intolerance, and that ‘Swedishness’ was being elevated into a norm on dubious grounds (Sm, 30 August 2002, 23). In a response to criticism from the advocates of restriction, she remarked, concerning Jansson’s oftcited study, that ‘stupidities do not become less stupid only because someone has written them down in a book’. She also hinted that Jansson ‘may himself be a bearer and a multiplier of the discriminatory attitudes that make it so hard for immigrants and refugees to become integrated in Swedish society’ (Sm, 30 August 2002, 23). After hurling this incendiary comment, the Green Party assembly member seemed to have had the final word. There was a belated response almost a month later in which her credentials for challenging the scholarly authority of Lars Jansson were questioned (Sm, 25 September 2002, 26). This tactic had also been employed previously during the debate (Sm, 15 August 2002, 22). However, by all appearances, the debate on the costs of immigration had ended, at least for the rest of the year. It should be added that many letters did not make it into the pages of the newspaper. According to the managing editor of Smålänningen, several letters were thrown into the dustbin since they expressed purely racist views. They were quite simply not fit to print.36 Conclusion The view adhered to by the leading representatives of Smålänningen is that the newspaper reports on reality as it is, but does do not try to influence it or create it. 37 In other words, according to this view, the media should

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be an arena, not an actor. This might under some circumstances be a commendable view, as a local daily newspaper dominating a town the size of Ljungby might easily turn into a formidable actor, were this ever the ambition of the owner. However, there are occasions when the view of the newspaper as a mere vessel, bringing the news untainted to the reader, might backfire, despite lofty ambitions at the outset. This could in my view occur when the journalists perceive that ‘reality’ is sizzling with discontent over marginalized or stigmatized groups, and when almost no one speaks out on these groups’ behalf. Taking the side of the underdogs, one might otherwise reason that writing articles that more clearly take a stance on behalf of the outgroups might help to take some of the pressure off them. This is of course a route that is closed off if one believes that the media should be but a mirror. As shown by the letters to the editor debate in Smålänningen during the year 2002, there are worrying undercurrents even in seemingly tranquil small-town settings like Ljungby. Of course there is no way of knowing just how local the letter-writers were; some of the more blatant letters might well have been written by people having their residence elsewhere than in the small town itself. Still, the high-pitched discussion on immigration and multiculturalism is likely to have had an impact on discussions in Ljungby, not least because the letters page is markedly popular among the readers. The local newspaper is not only a mirror, it is also an actor constructing reality, a fact that should at all times be borne in mind by editors and writing journalists alike. This story may seem mundane, but the mundane can tell us a great deal about undercurrents in a community. In a town the size of Ljungby there are apparently kitchen-table debates going on about immigrants and refugees. Not all of the voices in the discussion seem to be appealing ones, and several stereotypes prevail. The media have a great responsibility to shoulder here. If they fail in this task, they can easily turn into pedlars of stereotypes and unsavoury enemy-images that can never be falsified. When confronted with a barrage of negative reporting about immigrants and asylum-seekers, readers who are convinced from the outset that foreigners ought to go home are prone to become even more entrenched in their views, and those who are ambivalent on the matter are likely to start to wonder.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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Interview with the managing editor Christer Gustafsson and the news editor Lars Davidsson of Smålänningen, 9 April 2003. John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in U. S. Politics (Minneapolis, 1996). Teun A. van Dijk, Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk (Newbury Park, CA, 1987), 26. Marcin Starnawski, ‘Nationalist discourse and the ultra-conservative press in contemporary Poland: a case study of Nasz Dziennik’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 37, no. 1, 2003, 65–81. Hyvel Bishop and Adam Jaworski, ‘“We beat ’em”: nationalism and the hegemony of homogeneity in the British press reportage of Germany versus England during Euro 2000’, Discourse & Society, vol. 14, no. 3, 2003, 244. Denis McQuail, McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (London, 2000), 64. Bishop and Jaworski, 267. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago, 1999), 129. Gunnar Nygren, Medier och medborgare i den digitala kommunen (Stockholm, 2001), 52. Larsåke Larsson, Nyheter i samspel: studier i kommunjournalistik (Göteborg, 1998), 10; Lars Nord and Gunnar Nygren, Medieskugga (Stockholm, 2002), 35. Erik Nordahl Svendsen, Avisen i lokalsamfundet: Skive Folkeblad og Herning Folkeblad (Aarhus 1979), 23–4. Nord and Nygren, 35. Charlotta Kratz, ‘Storstad och landsort’, in Lennart Weibull and Charlotta Kratz (eds), Tidningsmiljöer : Dagstidningsläsning på 1990-talet (Göteborg, 1995), 55. Olof Petersson and Ingrid Carlberg, Makten över tanken: En bok om det svenska mediesamhället (Stockholm, 1990). Paul Hartmann, Charles Husband and Jean Clark, ‘Race as news: a study of the handling of race in the British national press from 1963 to 1970’, in UNESCO, Race as News (Paris, 1974), 92. Jan Ekecrantz and Tom Olsson, Det redigerade samhället. Om journalistikens, beskrivningsmaktens och det informerade förnuftets historia (Stockholm, 1998), 28. Wayne Brekhus, ‘A mundane manifesto’, Journal of Mundane Behavior, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, available at www.mundanebehavior.org/issues/v1n1/brekhus.htm (viewed 11 July 2005). Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York, 1991), 3. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume 1: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague, 1962), cited in Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York, 1978), 185. See Brekhus. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995). Nygren; Lennart Weibull, ‘Svenska tidningshus i ett nytt medielandskap’, in Ingela Wadbring and Lennart Weibull (eds), Tryckt. 20 kapitel om dagstidningar i början av 2000-talet (Göteborg, 2000). Sean P. Hier and Joshua L. Greenberg, ‘Constructing a discursive crisis: risk, problematization and illegal Chinese in Canada’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2002, 494.

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24 McQuail, 64. 25 Colette Guillaumin, ‘Changes in inter-ethnic “attitudes” and the influence of the mass media as shown by research in French-speaking countries’, in UNESCO, Race as News, 81. 26 John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge, 1992), 311. 27 Billig. 28 Bengt Johansson, Nyheter mitt ibland oss. Kommunala nyheter, personlig erfarenhet och lokal opinionsbildning (Göteborg, 1998), 97. 29 Nick Lynn and Susan Lea, ‘“A phantom menace and the new apartheid”: the social construction of asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom’, Discourse & Society, vol. 14, no. 4, 2003, 425–52. 30 The statistics are collected from internal reader surveys as provided by SvenInge Idofson, the secretary of the editorial board of Smålänningen. 31 Cf. Ulrika Jessen, Emma Nordenstedt and Sarina Sandman, ‘En läsarundersökning om Smålänningens bilaga “med mera”’, unpublished paper (Göteborg, 1999). 32 Cf. John Flowerdew, David C. S. Li and Sarah Tran, ‘Discriminatory news discourse: some Hong Kong data’, Discourse & Society, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, 343; Bo Petersson and Anders Hellström, ‘Stereotyper i vardagen: bilder av de främmande’, in Karin Borevi and Per Strömblad (eds), Kategorisering och integration, SOU 2004:48, (Stockholm, 2004), 107. 33 This will be elaborated on in a forthcoming study by the author. 34 Interviews with managing editor Christer Gustafsson and news editor Lars Davidsson, 9 April 2003. 35 The abbreviation Sm will henceforth be used for bracketed references to articles in Smålänningen. 36 Interview with the managing editor of Smålänningen, Christer Gustafsson, 9 April 2003. 37 Interview with Gustafsson and news editor Lars Davidsson, 9 April 2003.

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PATRIOTISM OR NATIONALISM? German Notions of Political Normality since 1990 Franziska Augstein

The title of this paper features an oxymoron: German normality. One could reformulate this issue in terms of a series of questions. Is there political normality in Germany? Is such a thing even permissible? There are two main dimensions to this issue, one relating to domestic, the other to foreign policy, and these raise further fundamental questions. Following the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic became a single unified and officially independent nation. Can this nation now afford to pursue its own foreign policy? The issue of domestic policy is even more complicated. Are Germans permitted to act as if they were just like the citizens of other nations? Do they want to do so? To put this differently: can Germans, in their political life, act as though ‘Auschwitz’ never happened? Constraints on foreign policy Let us turn initially to foreign policy. For approximately forty-five years, the GDR and the Federal Republic were vassal nations of the two hegemonic world powers. The GDR’s policies were determined by the Soviet Union, while West German foreign policy was oriented towards the United States. Freedom of action in the realm of foreign policy existed at best merely in trivial matters, and West Germany was granted only very limited room for manoeuvre even within Europe. It was at least a theoretical possibility that Germany’s newly attained independence after 1990 could have included freedom in the realm of foreign policy. But the fact that Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe during the following decade were defined primarily in economic terms is hardly surprising. The Federal Republic’s traditional ties to the West, however, could have been

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modified. Indeed, this is precisely what many observers feared at the beginning of the 1990s, particularly in France. At that time, political commentators expressed concern that the newly united Federal Republic, with its eighty million inhabitants, would again be driven by the old nationalistic and expansionist ambitions. ‘German normality’: many contemporaries feared that this could mean a return to the old policies of the Wilhelminian period. We know now that this was not to be the case. West Germans, then led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had learned the lessons of de-Nazification well. That is, they had learned that 1945 was to be regarded as a year of liberation, while the Marshall Plan, from which West Germany had benefitted economically, was to be interpreted as a gift from the Americans. Since that time, West Germans—and recently East Germans as well—have learned to be grateful to the United States: thankful for their democracy, thankful for their post-war reconstruction, thankful for their membership in NATO. Whenever the United States is criticized by Germans today, as was the case recently at the time of the invasion of Iraq, there are always German politicians and diplomatic experts who are quick to point out that this kind of critique is misplaced, not least because the Germans ‘have so much to thank’ the United States for. Such reservations were expressed, for example, by the political scientist Lord Dahrendorf as well as by the foreign policy experts of the main opposition party, the Christian Democrats. Gratitude, however, is not a political category, and the Marshall Plan, in helping to fill West German refrigerators, created a new market for American products. The notion of gratitude also obscures the essential factor that continues to determine the Federal Republic’s foreign policy: the United States is more powerful than Europe, which remains dependent on American leadership. To people who expressed those reservations, including those who are perhaps truly thankful towards the United States, Germany’s newfound independence does not mean that the country should pursue policies at odds with American interests. This is particularly true on questions of war and peace. Behind this imperative is the intuitive assumption that nothing that the United States undertakes could be morally reprehensible. Formulated more pointedly, because the United States defeated Nazi Germany, it is seen as guarantor that the Holocaust will not be repeated anywhere on this earth. This principle has even been endorsed by the radical sociologist Jürgen Habermas. On 29 April 1999, in his plea for support for the war in Kosovo, Habermas wrote: ‘The Holocaust calls upon Germans to sweep aside the spatial and temporal boundaries of

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democratic society’s moral responsibilities.’ 1 This call for a universalization of morality as a result of the Holocaust was new. In fact, it arises less from the historical responsibility for the murder of millions of people than from the contemporary circumstance that the Federal Republic is now unified and more sovereign than ever. The German nation has finally gained a voice at the negotiating tables of the world powers. Conversely, it would have sounded ridiculous if, before 1989, Germans had demanded that a particular dictator be removed from power because he was another Hitler. According to what justification, or rather, according to what powerpolitical criterion could such a demand have been formulated? Habermas’s philosophically grounded moral universalism dovetails with the new world policies of the Bush administration, which justifies foreign military intervention with the claim that it is acting in the name of human rights and in the interest of the repressed peoples concerned. This dovetailing of positions is not accidental. It has developed within the political vacuum that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since that collapse, there has no longer been a balance of power, as the United States has become the most powerful nation in the world. Whoever possesses an abundance of power, according to the new logic, possesses an abundance of ‘morality’ as well. Only a few weeks after publishing those ideas on political-moral universalism, Habermas had already distanced himself from his own views about the necessity of the war in Kosovo.2 But this did not mean that the idea of the worldwide export of an enlightened, liberal-democratic morality, which was supposed to replace the earlier export of German amorality, had disappeared. For this idea ultimately accorded with the American position as it had earlier been defined by the Clinton administration. Thus, it is not surprising that Joschka Fischer, the pro-American German foreign minister, was among those who had already employed similar formulations. During the war in Kosovo, German politicians grotesquely misused slogans such as ‘Auschwitz’, ‘genocide’ and ‘concentration camps’ to legitimize their support for military intervention. They would have been closer to the truth if they had recalled the dictum of the foreign minister of the early Weimar Republic, Walther Rathenau: ‘Wars of destiny are examinations which a state must pass in order to be admitted to a higher class.’ The war in Kosovo was certainly not a war of destiny, but its supporters shaped it into one through their references to Auschwitz. Through its participation in this war, Germany in effect aspired to be admitted into that higher class of nations. It is significant that Fischer was accused at the time of acting as if he were an obedient pupil of the

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US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. His loyalty paid off. Since that time, the Federal Republic has once again become an important player, in geo-political terms too. The fact that the invasion of Iraq, which the coalition government led by Schröder and Fischer refused to support, has cast a shadow upon this newly acquired status has perturbed many people in Germany. In the old Federal Republic, it was customary for West Germans to draw a line at their own front door. Their goal was realistic: not to save the world, but rather to establish a democratic civil society within their own borders. The sense of mission that has spread since the 1990s does not, at its core, have a philosophical or moral basis, and it certainly does not have an historical basis. However, there are certain precedents. When the first war against Saddam Hussein began in 1991, the author Hans Magnus Enzensberger and others took a stand against the Iraqis in name of the Holocaust, transforming Saddam Hussein into the new Hitler. In 1999 a similar process occurred with Slobodan Milosevic. However, German government officials, prior to unification, were cautious about drawing comparisons between foreign conflicts and the Holocaust and its protagonists. Instead, such comparisons were reserved for use within the Federal Republic’s own borders. As the cultural historian Aleida Assmann has pointed out, the left-wing Rote Armee Fraktion terrorists were called ‘Hitler’s children’. And in 1986 Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl noted that the GDR still had political prisoners interned ‘in penitentiaries and concentration camps’. At that time ‘Auschwitz’, not the real historical concentration camp but rather the symbolic concept with its contemporary implications, was located on German soil. Today, the implications of this concept can be found everywhere, and this, unfortunately, is a further sign of the Federal Republic’s new normality. In other countries too, above all the United States, ‘Auschwitz’ is also a reference point when one wants to lend historical weight to current political decisions. However, President George W. Bush and his advisors used different arguments to justify the second war against Saddam Hussein, linking their actions to 9/11 and the ‘war against terror’. At first sight, one could argue that German opposition to the war, at the risk of alienating the United States, was a sign of political maturity from a nation that had learned its lesson from two world wars. This, too, is related to the issue of normality: a welcome reluctance to support military action unless the case for war is convincingly made. In so far as we can say that a country can learn something, we would have to conclude that the citizens of the Federal Republic have learned from their own history. Germans supported the war in

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Afghanistan, for the sake of the United States, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The decision to invade Iraq, however, was beyond the comprehension of most Germans, who have little sympathy for this kind of interventionist policy and showed this by their support for Schröder’s position in the elections of October 2002. But now, with the United States and the Bush administration unashamedly using war to achieve regime change, Germans are told that being ‘normal’ means participating in military campaigns. And if they do not want to participate, there are a myriad of political experts who regard this as a mistake, simply because America has become so powerful that no European political leader should dare to oppose its will, even when most of the population is opposed to the war. And if that leader stands up to the United States, as Chancellor Schröder did, than he must surely, at some point in the future, seek diplomatic reconciliation with the affronted Bush administration. Europe cannot act without the United States, especially when the American administration imagines that it can engage in politics without any regard for Europe. For this reason, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Schröder felt obliged to visit President Bush and seek a reconciliation, promising substantial financial support for the reconstruction of Iraq. This is doubtless ‘normal’ Realpolitik, as it has always been practised by weaker nations, and the action of the German government was not very different from that of other European nations. In this sense, we may say that the Federal Republic engages in normal foreign policy today, but it has difficulty in developing a strategy that is independent of either the United States or the European Union. This is especially true of Germany’s relations with Israel, which continue—with good reason—to be so historically burdened that Germans prefer a policy of diplomatically lying low. Here, too, Germany has adopted the European line, although it is no secret that the United States sets the tone here as well. So once again ‘normality’ is a problematic category when applied to German foreign policy.3 Domestic debates Different rules apply to German domestic policy. Here the question arises as to how successful Germans have been in their so-called ‘coming to terms with the past’, and whether this process—as is customary with therapies—can be allowed to reach a conclusion. Germans have dealt extensively with their Nazi past. Over the last three decades, they have immersed themselves in that history through a series of ‘waves of commemoration’, and each of these waves, whether it was initiated by a day

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of remembrance or a Hollywood film, has helped a new generation of Germans to understand that past in a new way. However, there are other, less understanding people, who also commemorate the past, but in a different way. Thus in September 2003 law enforcement agents had to take action to thwart an attack by right-wing radicals in Munich. The radicals had planned to detonate a bomb at the site of the new synagogue in that city during the foundation-laying ceremony, scheduled for 9 November. This date has an unparalleled commemorative significance in German history. On 9 November 1918, Gustav Scheidemann proclaimed the establishment the German Republic; Hitler’s attempted putsch in Munich also took place on 9 November, five years later; on 9 November 1938 the Nazis orchestrated the pogrom known as the Reichskristallnacht; and on 9 November 1989 the Wall that had separated East and West Germany finally fell. The choice of precisely this date for laying the foundation stone of the new Munich synagogue certainly inspired the right-wing radicals as they planned their attack. This episode had puzzling aspects for German law enforcement agencies. According to its investigations, the majority of those involved in the Munich plot were respectably dressed right-wing radicals, not thugs with shaved heads and steel-tipped boots. Their methods had a certain ‘normality’. They had concentrated on the dissemination of propaganda and, showing blind trust in authority, had meticulously respected local traffic regulations. This development is rather disturbing. Three years earlier, groups of right-wing thugs in East Germany had attracted media attention throughout the world. They, too, had been dressed respectably, which, however, did not hinder them from beating a number of foreigners to death. In 1999, when right-wing attacks were reported throughout the media, the majority of the German population were appalled. They feared that they would find that the Nazi past, which they had investigated, commemorated and worked through so thoroughly, had caught up with them behind their backs. These groups of thugs and their well-dressed sympathizers, nostalgic for the Nazi era, were beginning to challenge the consensus with their own style of commemoration. The problem is that when one encounters this kind of neo-nationalist commemoration in Germany, it tends to argue not with words but with blows. Such developments make the question of German domestic ‘normality’ all the more important. Over the past fifty years, our understanding of the Nazi era has experienced a number of temporal and conceptual displacements. Many commentators now identify the overcoming of National Socialism as the founding myth of the Federal Republic. This is in itself a useful concept,

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although it does admittedly have one not entirely insignificant blemish, since it implies that the realities of the Nazi era are less important than the ensuing myth. In addition, the notion of a founding myth is not merely a descriptive concept, but also expresses a normative desire, and this impinges upon its usefulness as a descriptive category. This notion expresses the desire that future generations will also be able to preserve the memory of the Nazi past, as a solemn warning that will ensure that the rule of law will never again be endangered. The findings of opinion polls, however, appear to be at odds with this desire. For example, in a survey commissioned by the Federal Association of German Banks and carried out by the Ipos Institute in the winter of 1999, Germans were asked whether they would like to make a ‘clean break with history’. The result was that 56 per cent of those questioned were in favour of making a clean break with the Nazi era, while 60 per cent were in favour of making a clean break with the history of the GDR. In short, more than half the German population do not wish to live their lives in the shadow of history. Taking a closer look at the question of German normality within this domestic context, we need to ask some questions. How has the way in which Germans deal with their past changed? How should we characterize the current phase of ‘dealing with the past’? And how does this phase differ from the situation before the unification of the two Germanys? Although the notion of normality has been invoked throughout the history of the Federal Republic, it is only since the withdrawal of Allied troops that we are really justified in speaking of something like a return to conventional politics. Today’s normality is more believable than that invoked by Ludwig Erhardt in the 1960s or by Helmut Kohl in the 1980s. This new normality, with all its underlying ambiguities and evasions, is eminently represented by Gerhard Schröder. When a former slave labourer aggressively insisted that Nazi crimes were truly unique, Schröder simply agreed, saying that he had no problem at all with this view. In fact, Schröder has no problem with history at all. Thus he could also state that the Berlin Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe should be a place that people ‘enjoy visiting’. Schröder himself has remained relatively untouched by history, and the reasons for this lie not least in his own biography. As the son of a cleaning lady and of a father who died in the Second World War, Schröder lacks the kind of connection to history that is characteristic of members of the traditional establishment, who see themselves and their families as part of a historical continuum. In addition, Schröder himself has experienced directly what it means to construct his own existence from nothing, growing up as the son of a poor woman who had to struggle

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to survive. Since he has built his career from nothing, it could be argued that it is easier for him to detach himself from the German past. It has frequently been observed that Schröder is able to say things about the Nazi past that his predecessor Helmut Kohl could not even have implied without provoking a political sensation. Although this may be true, the two cases are not strictly comparable. For there is no Social Democrat or Green Party equivalent for the ‘new uninhibitedness’ with which Kohl invited President Reagan to commemorate the fallen SS soldiers at the military cemetery in Bitburg in 1985. Gerhard Schröder, on the contrary, is truly uninhibited, because he is simply not interested in history. One may hold this against him as a private individual. However, whether a chancellor makes wise decisions because he has read history books, or because he happens to possess an intuitive diplomatic and political sense, is ultimately irrelevant. Schröder’s engagement in the issue of reparations for Nazi slave labourers shows that political prudence can provide a substitute for a personal concern with history. A new legitimacy? Since the GDR was incorporated into the Federal Republic, Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past has acquired new dimensions. In books on political history, one repeatedly reads that the left wing in Germany accepted the Berlin Wall as a retribution for history, that is, for the crimes committed during the Nazi era. Originally this idea, as expressed by Karl Jaspers, doubtless reflected a broad feeling among the population. However, over the course of time, West Germans simply became accustomed to the existence of two German nations. Since getting used to something doesn’t make for a good argument, commentators have tended to appeal to the ‘retribution of history’ idea when trying to explain why West Germans felt no yearning to include the territory of the GDR within their own borders. In addition, the notion of a historical punishment has allowed West Germans to avoid the disconcerting question of whether it was historically just that GDR citizens had, comparatively speaking, had the worst of the bargain. Morally, this question would have led into muddy waters. Thus, references to the German past provided a convenient moral underpinning for the fact that West Germans had simply become accustomed to the division. It was, of course, easier for young people to adopt this attitude than for members of the older generation, who had known Germany as an undivided country. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that within the Green Party, the party of youth, lack of enthusiasm for reunification was particularly widespread.

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This is one of the reasons why many young people did not feel capable of joining in discussions about the moral significance of the fall of the Wall. Those who did participate tended to understand the fall of the Wall symbolically, either as a long overdue confirmation of Germany’s emancipation from history or as a signal that the sentence imposed for Germany’s political crimes had been duly served. This was an emotional reaction that might be translated in discursive terms in the following way. The Wall existed because of National Socialism and was the stigma of German guilt. When the Wall fell, the punishment was over and hence it was no longer necessary to feel so guilty. Or at least it became possible to speak more uninhibitedly about German guilt. This reorientation can be found on both sides of the political spectrum, among conservatives as well as among those with left-wing sympathies. Even in the 1980s, the Kohl administration used the new interest in the German past to underline the continuities of history and the extended duration of historical time, thereby reducing the Third Reich to a historical interlude. Recently this process of reintegration has strikingly accelerated. In the year 2000, the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin opened a new restaurant that included as decoration a bust of Wilhelm I, who became emperor of the newly united German Reich in 1871. Shortly after this, an exhibition entitled ‘Europa, Germania, Bavaria’ toured through Bavaria. The very title of this exhibition betrays a conception of history that is able effortlessly to absorb twelve years of dictatorship into a grand continuum. The alternative to this extension of historical vision is an even more problematic foreshortening, which we frequently encounter in scholarly historiography: one focuses exclusively on the history of the Federal Republic, thereby removing all previous eras from scrutiny. A typical example is provided by the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden, which is dedicated to the investigation of totalitarianism. The conservative functionaries in Saxony who finance the institute have determined that it should focus its investigations on the period since 1945. Stated simply, the patrons of the institute are interested solely in a critical investigation of the history of the GDR. Given this approach, institute studies will necessarily tend to demonstrate the beneficence of the current Federal Republic. We can observe a similar approach at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. This institute, which is directed by Horst Möller, a historian who became highly influential during the Kohl era, received poor ratings at recent sessions of the German Scholarly Council. Over the past few years, the Institute for Contemporary History has focused primarily on the history of the Federal Republic, since its members are

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convinced that the Nazi era has already been exhaustively researched. We find a further variant on this evasive strategy in a project of the current Social Democratic–Green Party coalition: the Military Historical Research Institute in Potsdam. This institute has a new director, who also proposes to shift the focus of research to post-war history. In Potsdam, researchers will now be concerned primarily with the history of NATO. This might imply that the institute will increasingly conduct research that is directly useful for politicians and political institutions. The new historiography abounds in contradictions. At times German scholarship runs the risk of overlooking the past and regarding 1945 not merely as a ‘zero hour’, but as the beginning of all history. On the other hand, conservatives continue to see history in terms of extended time periods, thereby downplaying the significance of the Nazi era in more subtle ways. In opposition to both the ‘zero hour’ and the ‘longue durée’ approaches, the left-liberal position declares the memory of Auschwitz and National Socialism to be the political foundation and moral basis of the Federal Republic. The proponents of this position argue that, precisely because Germans committed such horrendous crimes, they have a special moral obligation to respect human dignity and human rights. German laws on political asylum, for example, are ultimately based on this idea. This sense of responsibility also means that the quality of democracy and the rule of law are measured by the degree to which the German nation has confronted the memory of the Nazi era. In other words: the better the historical memory, the better the modern politics. Representatives of this position have interpreted the fall of the Wall differently from the conservatives. The sociologist Helmut Dubiel exemplifies this left-liberal position. In a study of the status of National Socialism in Bundestag debates, Dubiel has argued that, since the fall of the Wall, democracy in the Federal Republic has been legitimated in a radically new and explicitly moral way. Earlier, Dubiel writes, liberal democracies in the West legitimated themselves by ‘highlighting the contrasts between themselves and totalitarianism’, in both its left-wing and rightwing forms. They derived their right to existence from the fact that socialism, as practised in the Eastern bloc, was an inferior alternative. However, with the collapse of socialism this source of self-assurance has disappeared. When, after 1989, the notion of an ‘over there’ no longer existed for critics of capitalism, a ‘significant reordering began in the symbolic household of liberal democracy’. According to Dubiel, the Federal Republic was the first nation in which this reordering emerged. Indeed,

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the German experience indicates what this new model of post-national and post-totalitarian identity looks like. Since reunification, Dubiel continues, the democratic legitimacy of the Federal Republic has been nourished above all by ‘public reflection about that nation’s own guilt’. In this new form of legitimacy, he sees a model that may be beginning to emerge in other western democracies as well. He finds similar developments, for example, in admissions by the United States that Native Americans were subjected to grave injustices, or in Spanish confessions that the conquistadors caused great suffering for the peoples of South America. For Dubiel, such apologies signal the increasingly post-national and morally responsible constitution of modern nations. This concept of a post-totalitarian legitimacy grounded in the recognition of national guilt is a wonderful idea, but unfortunately it is somewhat naive. The proposal that we understand the German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) as a model for a better future may be ingenious, but it is also unrealistic.4 Against this, it can be argued that Dubiel exaggerates the turn that occurred in 1989/1990, underestimating the divisions that still persist within a reunited Germany. For the debate about totalitarianism, including the opposition of East and West Germany implicit in that theory, is by no means over. The founding of the Hannah Arendt Institute was a significant milestone. Previously, West Germans may have criticized the leftist totalitarianism of the GDR, but today many aim at placing East German Communism on the same level as National Socialism. It is more or less taboo to draw comparisons between the Federal Republic and the GDR, and anyone who disregards this taboo is regarded as unworthy of West German democracy. This specially applies to former GDR citizens who continue to find anything praiseworthy in their former state. East Germans are accepted by the West only on condition that they refrain from drawing such comparisons. Anyone who violates this precept must be prepared to suffer the consequences, as was the case with the political commentator Daniela Dahn. In 1998 she was debarred from becoming a lay-judge at the Constitution Court of the federal state of Brandenburg because of her political writings. One is, however, permitted to draw comparisons between the GDR and National Socialism and to stress the similarities between the two political systems, since such comparisons serve to cement the superiority of the Federal Republic. Moreover, through the satisfaction of having overcome the oppressive GDR regime, the memory of the Nazi era is also defused. In this way, the Federal Republic becomes a nation that has emerged victorious from two totalitarian systems.

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The complications of recent history resist such simplistic comparisons. In one important respect, the GDR and the Nazi era have not been handled in the same way: namely, in dealings with the collaborators and supporters of the two systems.5 In 1983 Hermann Lübbe published his now famous article in which he defended the ‘communicative silence’ about German war crimes following the Second World War. Protected by a ‘certain silence’, the population of the post-war Federal Republic was able, according to Lübbe, to transform itself into a democratic citizenry. Precisely because the process of de-Nazification was undertaken in such a half-hearted way, West Germans were allowed the scope to practise democratic thinking. After all, the rules of democracy had to be relearned, and people pilloried for their wrongdoings make poor students.6 Since Lübbe’s explanatory model has found many adherents, it is all the more surprising that it has not been applied to the GDR. But East Germans have not been granted the latitude of a ‘certain silence’ in any form. Rather, the West, with a clear conscience and a sense of moral outrage, has called upon them to account for their actions. The former East German elite has been removed from power, and the GDR itself has been declared a criminal aberration. The entire phenomenon, we are given to understand, was one enormous mistake. Against this background of recrimination, it is hardly surprising that right-wing radicalism has become so widespread in East Germany. We have to realize that the majority of former GDR citizens have experienced a profound humiliation over the past dozen years. Anyone who was not politically compromised was simply incorporated by western capitalism, and East Germans have felt compelled to demonstrate that they are not so naively stupid as their shrewd and hard-working West German counterparts tend to think. Unemployment among young people is not the only source of right-wing radicalism in the new federal states; there is also the unemployment of their parents, the parents’ lack of orientation, their dull resentment and the fact that they have lost all claims to authority. Anyone who witnesses the humiliation of his or her parents will need to look to other models of orientation. Conversely, the disaffected parents may secretly approve of their children’s misdeeds. Of course, right-wing radicalism in the East also has other causes, but if we ask ourselves why this phenomenon is so widespread, we cannot ignore the fact that West Germany has acted towards the GDR as a victor. If, after the fall of the Wall, the GDR was assigned a moral position in direct proximity to National Socialism, it is hardly surprising that so many East Germans react accordingly. In one further respect, the memory of National Socialism

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obstructs a fruitful and enlightened confrontation with current right-wing radicalism. Compared with the heinous crimes of the Nazi era, the rightwing radicalism of today cannot but appear trivial, and for this reason its significance has been systematically downplayed. Politicians and journalists prefer to not make too much fuss about neo-Nazis, since they do not want to jeopardize Germany’s international respectability, so arduously regained. Conclusion This paper has shown how German attitudes towards the past have changed since 1990. On the practical political level, it is clear that a real normalization has begun. In its foreign relations, the Federal Republic has gradually become an ordinary European nation. But within Germany, this normalization has had more questionable effects. Germany’s sense of historical responsibility, enhanced by the transformation of attitudes towards the Holocaust, has become increasingly grandiose. Today, the spokespeople of public morality are no longer satisfied that Germans seek to become democratic citizens. They also strive to establish human rights throughout the world, even if—as in Kosovo—this involves support for war. Even in the case of Iraq, a significant number of German intellectuals spoke out in support of the war. For example, during an in-house conference for regular contributors organized in summer 2003 by the conservative journal Merkur, a leading Kant scholar named Volker Gerhardt invoked the moral philosopher’s ideas in support of the invasion. Moreover, it is clear that German unification has proved a mixed blessing, above all because the denigration of the GDR has become conflated with the memory of National Socialism. Both are regarded as vanquished political orders, with the Federal Republic emerging as the victor. The fact that the continued equation of the GDR with National Socialism has indirectly supported right-wing radicalism is simply overlooked in this process. The opponents of communicative silence during the Adenauer era provided an important service for the Federal Republic. They initiated an honest confrontation with the Nazi era, giving substance to the precept of ‘coming to terms with the past’. But it is surely a mistake for the West to persist in denigrating East German anti-Fascism before 1989 as state-ordered propaganda. Although there is an element of truth in this allegation, we surely do a grave injustice to many East Germans, and to the socialist ideals that inspired them, when we dismiss their antiFascism as mere lip service. Further problems arise from the treatment of the Holocaust as the founding myth of German democracy. The Israeli historian Mosche

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Zuckermann suspects that the interest of what he calls the ‘new left’ in the Holocaust serves in truth to help them secure their own identity. Zuckermann argues that since the new left has now become ‘a comfortable part of the vigorous establishment of the West German Republic’, they need the Holocaust in order to form an identity that distinguishes them from their conservative counterparts. Thus, from Zuckermann’s perspective, we cannot speak of the Holocaust as an authentic German foundational myth. Rather, he argues, the Holocaust has become a ‘projection surface’, which the left uses in their ‘future-less confrontation with the past’. There is undoubtedly some truth in this position. And since the GDR, which many West German leftists saw as a country that strove to realize their own ideals, no longer exists, the necessity of defining themselves through their relation to the past has increased. To end on a more positive note, we may conclude that in Germany today there is little risk of patriotism degenerating into nationalism. Germans are too aware of the fact that they can only make policy in alliance with other nations, and there is little to fear from the rantings of rightwing populists, who—as Edmund Stoiber, the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, has said—want to attain sovereignty over beer halls. But normality remains a disputed field. As a rule, one invokes normality when one doesn’t have it. In discussions over German participation in the war against Iraq, it was apparent that the central issue was whether the Federal Republic could afford to formulate a foreign policy independent of the United States. In that case, the debate about normality played no role at all. If normality is invoked, then it is more likely to be done by the German right. For the left, the attainment of normality depends on not forgetting Auschwitz and the Second World War. ‘Thank God, we’re normal. This is our finest shower’, wrote the dramatist John Osborne in a witty turn of phrase. Fortunately, Germans take showers frequently, and that is where their neighbours prefer to see them, rather than in other places.

Notes 1 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Bestialität und Humanität’, Die Zeit, 29 April 1999. 2 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Zweifellos eine Antwort auf Peter Handke’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18 May 1999. 3 For a fuller discussion, see Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Oxford, 1997). 4 Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich, 1999), 232 and 291–2. 5 For a study of the different ways in which the Federal Republic and the GDR

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treated the Nazi past, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA, 1997). 6 Hermann Lübbe, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein’, Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 236, 1983, 579–99.

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GERMANY’S NEW RIGHT Jan Herman Brinks

This paper is designed to analyse the genesis of Germany’s New Right and the features that are making it such an influential force in contemporary politics and the media. These developments need to be seen within a European context. Although the European New Right is not a unified or coherent school of thought, it is best understood as a spiritual and political counter movement against the New Left of 1968. It originated in France and was founded by Alain de Benoist whose Groupement de Recherche et d’Études sur la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) sets the tone for the New Right in the whole of Europe.1 De Benoist claims to be neither rightwing nor left-wing, but from his writings it is clear that his philosophy generally links elements of right-wing extremism and conservatism. The Nouvelle Droite in France and Germany’s Neue Rechte are closely connected. The French wing draws strongly on the ideas of the so-called ‘conservative revolution’ in Weimar Germany, while the German branch of GRECE, the so-called Thule Seminar, was founded in 1980 by the Frenchman Pierre Krebs. 2 The oxymoronic construct ‘conservative revolution’ refers to a circle of right-wing intellectuals who, in Germany after the First World War, attempted to prime a spiritual and political revolution strongly opposed to both communism and liberalism. The aim of these writers was not a restoration, the establishment of a party state or a class society, but the foundation of a Volksgemeinschaft, a mythical society of the German people. Conservative revolutionaries and the New Right Those old conservative revolutionaries, like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, Edgar Julius Jung and Ernst Jünger, were not right-wing extremists in the classical sense of the word, but can be regarded as meta-politicians. In practice, however, they turned out to be spiritual precursors of National Socialism. They took their cue from imperial Germany and wanted to pick up the thread from before the First World War. Nationalist and anti-western sentiments and resentments played an

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important part in their thinking, and their counter-revolutionary activity was directed explicitly against the ideals of the French Revolution: freedom, equality and fraternity. To them, those ‘ideas of 1789’ were alien to the German state, nation and people, all three of which were to be regarded as more or less congruent. The New Right has adopted many principles from these earlier conservative revolutionaries, adding ideas relating to present situations. As a result of continuous overlaps, it is not easy to make a clear distinction between the different tendencies within the New Right camp. Until the 1980s, New Right authors were often referred to as ‘national-conservatives’. Important spokesmen of the national-conservative grouping include Bernard Willms, Günter Maschke and Hans-Dietrich Sander, who are all heavily influenced by the law philosopher Carl Schmitt. In addition to these ‘traditionalists’, there exists a more ‘left’ and ‘national-revolutionary’ wing, influenced by conservative revolutionaries like Ernst Niekisch, who had advocated a ‘national-Bolshevist’ and anti-western policy in the Weimar Republic, and by Otto Strasser, who was one of the architects of a radical ‘left wing’ of the National Socialist Party. An outspoken example of a New Right author who cleverly manages to link ‘left’ and ‘right’ elements is the for mer Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU)-member Henning Eichberg (pseudonym Hartwig Singer), who played a decisive role in the development of the concept of ‘ethno-pluralism’.3 In 1972 he wrote the policy statement of the Aktion Neue Rechte. After initially sympathizing with Otto Strasser, Eichberg made contact with the Nouvelle Droite and developed into one of Germany’s leading New Right spokesmen.4 By using postmodern jargon, Eichberg, who currently lives in Denmark, manages to get support from unexpected quarters. In 2003 Dr Uffe Østergaard, head of the Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, denied during an academic seminar led by the author of this article that Eichberg belonged to the New Right. Østergaard, an advocate of ‘post moral’ positions, proudly concluded that Eichberg could be considered as an ‘honorary citizen’ of Denmark. Judging from their numbers, New Right authors may appear to be a rather insignificant group, but appearances are deceptive. During the last decades the New Right has developed into an influential, if heterogeneous, ideological and organizational network with a significant public impact. By gaining leading positions in many different professions, its adherents act as multipliers of New Right ideological views. Well-known New Right periodicals include Europa Vorn, Wir selbst, Staatsbriefe, Sleipnir, Nation und

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Europa, Deutsche Monatshefte, Criticón and the weekly Junge Freiheit. It is not always easy to determine whether these periodicals stay within the limits of the law. The periodical Junge Freiheit, which also attracts interview partners from the conservative establishment, tends to cross the line between conservatism and right-wing extremism on a more or less regular basis. Prominent New Right authors who write for Junge Freiheit include Karlheinz Weissman, whose views on democracy are clearly based on the ideas of Carl Schmitt; Klaus Rainer Röhl, who is the former publisher of the leftwing magazine Konkret; the well-known dramatist Botho Strauss; and former Die Welt journalist Rainer Zitelmann. During the last few years there has been a remarkable intellectualization of New Right publications in Europe. Just like their conservative revolutionary predecessors, New Right publicists are trying to bring about a cultural revolution. For this purpose, Benoist and his followers took over from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci the idea of gaining cultural supremacy as a necessary precondition for taking over political power. The German lawyer and New Right author Klaus Kunze put this aim into words very clearly: The most important factor is the breaking of the taboo. That is the first step on the road to the necessary re-evaluation of values. This begins with effective ridiculing of those parts of the opponent’s ‘ideology’ which cannot be used and ‘turned round’, as, for example, the democratic principle can be.5 One has to stress again that Germany’s Neue Rechte is not a homogeneous movement with a unified ideology. On the contrary, sometimes considerable differences of opinion between New Right authors or factions emerge. There is common ground, but there is also scope for profound differences of opinion, for example, over the question of which strategies should be used to influence mainstream politics, or how to get closer to political power, either through infiltration of the democratic conservative parties or through direct and open dispute. 6 Core ideas of the German New Right In what follows some of the New Right’s core ideas will be summarized, showing how they function within its mythology. The most significant are the concepts of Volksgemeinschaft and ‘ethno-pluralism’; New Right attitudes to the West, especially towards the United States; German unity; economic issues; relations between religion and democracy; and the so-called

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‘Prussian’ values. This leads to the key question of the impact of New Right ideas on contemporary German politics, particularly within the conservative parties. The Volksgemeinschaft New Right ideas on this subject can be traced back to Hegel and propagate reverence for the nation, state and history. In the ideology of the New Right, the Volk or people consists of a body, a Volksgemeinschaft, or a group of biologically similar human beings, and a Geist, a spirit, that is its cultural expression. Because the idea of race has such negative connotations, New Right authors usually avoid this word and conceal their thinking behind the concept of Kultur. The concepts of Volk and ‘nation’ are often equated, and the Volksgemeinschaft that, in the eyes of the New Right, is constantly threatened by foreigners, is geared to Prussian values. Following Carl Schmitt who, in his work Der Begriff des Politischen, had introduced the sharp distinction between ‘friend and foe’, opponents of those values, both inside and outside Germany, are considered enemies.7 The ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft has to be organized through a strong state with the help of nationalistic elites or a charismatic leader, and a very selective interpretation of German history is used to legitimize the authoritarian state. Ethno-pluralism It is hardly surprising that this pseudo-biological view of ‘people’ and ‘nation’ goes hand in hand with racism, although usually this is not openly professed, but cloaked in the observation that every race has a right to its own territory. The Thule Seminar campaigns for a so-called ‘heterogeneous world of homogeneous nations’. 8 In order to achieve this, New Right authors propagate ‘ethno-pluralism’, a concept that was largely developed by Henning Eichberg and is a form of social Darwinism. In this view, three main groups are distinguished, namely, the so-called Caucasian, Negroid and the Mongol races. Lurking in the background is the conviction that a mixture of these races must be prevented, and in practice a form of apartheid is advocated. 9 ‘Ethnopluralism’ is the intellectual variant of the right-wing extremist slogan ‘Germany for the Germans’. The New Right and ‘the West’ The New Right is generally very critical of a mythologized concept of ‘the West’. Some authors, such as former Die Welt journalist Hans Dietrich Sander, link their ‘national imperative’ to a decidedly anti-western attitude in which

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the Second World War plays an important role. The latter is regarded as part of a ‘hundred-year war of the western world against Germany’. 10 According to New Right authors Germany’s admission of guilt for the last war was dictated by the victorious Allies, and many believe that a line should be drawn under the Third Reich once and for all. Anti-Americanism This anti-western position, which is primarily directed against the United States and generally goes with a latent sympathy for Russia, also reveals itself in publications from a younger generation of New Right authors. A clear example of this outlook is the book Westbindung: Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland, published in 1993 by Rainer Zitelmann, Karlheinz Weissmann and Michael Grossheim.11 In books of this kind the United States is attacked for its cultural imperialism and denigrated as a society of ‘traders’, with mercantile values totally opposed to the New Right view of the world. But in its anti-Americanism there is also disguised racism. For New Right authors the United States is a perfect example of a very problematic immigrant society, and they are strongly opposed to multiculturalism. Furthermore, after the implosion of Communist rule in Europe, anti-Americanism offers a new vision of the enemy. According to its advocates, it is now time for the Americans to be brought down a peg or two, not least because of their ‘re-education’ of Germany after 1945 and the role they played in the division of the country. Furthermore, for some New Right authors, anti-Americanism is a means of overcoming the schism between the New Right and the New Left. Günter Maschke, Horst Mahler and Reinhold Oberlercher, all former members of the German Socialist Students Federation (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund), argue for example in their Canonical Declaration about the Movement of 1968: In the ’68 movement two national revolutionary movements emerged, the New Left and the New Right. The former plotted its main thrust against Americanism, the latter against Sovietism. The New Right has reached its short-term target and increasingly turns against Americanism and capitalism so that a unification of both these national-revolutionary wings took place. 12 German unity There is consensus on the question of territorial unification that, in the view of New Right authors, was only partly realized in 1990. They believe

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that the true Wiedervereinigung, namely, of the former eastern territories of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, is still imminent. This means that they do not recognize Poland’s western border and see it as a kind of provisional demarcation line. These revisionists want former German territories back not only for historical or economic reasons. They argue that a reconstituted German Silesia and Pomerania could also serve as a kind of ‘buffer’ against population migrations from Central and Eastern Europe. While in 1990 the conservatives promised ‘blossoming landscapes’ to the electorate in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the New Right were among the first to see the immediate consequences of the disappearance of the Iron Curtain. By using loaded terms like ‘Überfremdung’, New Right authors imply that Germany is in danger of being swamped by foreigners. More recently, some of these authors have begun to support a unified Europe for pragmatic reasons, hoping that the lost territories can be drawn back into the sphere of German influence after Polish accession to the European Union. On 14 December 2000, in anticipation of this event, the Prussian Claims Society was established. This Düsseldorf-based society, modelled on the Jewish Claims Conference, is concentrating on reclaiming ‘German’ homes in Poland, but also backs the claims of Sudeten Germans expelled from the Czech Republic and East Prussians from Russia. Its leaders have said it would first take test cases to national courts and, if they failed, to the European and American courts. In reaction to this, in the port city of Szczecin (formerly German Stettin), city authorities are offering Polish tenants of former German properties the chance to buy them at 10 per cent of market value. Lech Kaczynski, the mayor of Warsaw, declared that if the former landowners pressed their claim, the Polish city would retaliate with a 24.6 billion euros (£16.7 billion) counterclaim for damage caused by German troops. Economic issues Recently, New Right authors have also been concentrating on economic issues. They generally consider the current European Union as ‘SuperBabylon’ and blame advancing globalization for Germany’s economic difficulties and high level of unemployment. For them, just like their ‘conservative revolutionary’ predecessors, a national economy and far-reaching protectionism are the only solutions to these problems. Given Germany’s strong dependence on exports, this reasoning does not follow any economic logic. According to the critical investigations of Margret Feit, the New Right opposes ‘the levelling notion of equality’ and propagates a

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‘society of achievement’.13 However, they are not supporters of a free market economy on the western model. On the contrary, the New Right regards liberalism as ‘the cancer of our century and fundamentalism as the cure’. 14 It should be noted that this animosity towards liberalism is the demarcation line between mainstream conservatism and the New Right. Authors like Henning Eichberg have tried to combine an antiMarxist and an anti-capitalist position, while propagating a ‘European socialism’ to justify a so-called ‘new order’.15 This ‘new order’ is also to be extended throughout Europe in order to achieve its realization in the socalled ‘European nation’, which will eventually operate as a third power competing with the United States and Russia. According to these advocates, there is little doubt that Germany will dominate this ‘European nation’. The New Right and religion The new Germany also needs a ‘new’ religion. Just like their conservative revolutionary predecessors, New Right authors oppose not only materialism but also Christianity, Enlightenment and rationalism. Quite often they reject so-called Judaeo-Christianity and favour anti-egalitarian and neopagan religions. Their religiosity is rather polymorphous and bears antisemitic, racist and nationalist traits. Several New Right authors have attempted to attract supporters from the ecological and New Age movements. They promise salvation by going back to nature and to the people, stressing its Germanic character. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between har mless forms of esotericism and völkisch occult communities, but there is common ground, for both reject the ‘disenchanted’ modern world and both feed on pre-Christian cults and mysteries. The New Right and democracy From what has been said so far it is hardly surprising that the New Right rejects current forms of democracy. Like Carl Schmitt, New Right authors do not reject democracy at any price, but for them (national) identity is much more important than pluralism. According to them equal things should be treated equally and unequal things unequally. Their political philosophy stresses the importance of will-power and decision rather than discussion. For years the New Right has opposed the ‘waffle’ of the chattering classes. It emphatically regards West German democracy, just like ‘anti-Fascism’ in the former GDR, as a gift of the victors, mainly intended to humiliate the German people.

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‘Prussian’ values Immediately after reunification, the New Right saw opportunities arising, especially in the new Länder in the East, which were considered an ideal recruiting ground for their ideas. This assumption proved less far-fetched than at first it seemed. A substantial number of East Germans were far from pleased with the economic and psychological consequences of real existing democracy and longed for the return of some of the certainties of the old GDR. New Right authors appealed to this sense of insecurity, stressing, with some justification, that there was common ground between their ideas and the political culture of the former GDR, a country in which German identity and German nationalism were for a long time inseparable. One could even speak of an East German brand of nationalBolshevism. The East German Communist Party tried to create a synthesis of elements of nineteenth-century German nationalism and modern party Communism. Humanistic, liberal or democratic traditions remained undeveloped, and if these words had any meaning, it was often only in the service of the authoritarian state or of the party. The GDR always propagated fairly authoritarian standards in its methods of upbringing. Values regarded as essentially ‘socialist’ included the old ‘Prussian values’: order, discipline, punctuality, a sense of duty, cleanliness and physical toughness. These virtues, which were originally quite ascetic, were converted by the East German state into submissive attitudes, strikingly similar to the values that the New Right has been advocating for years. In 1992 the East German political commentator Bernd Wagner argued that right-wing extremism in the former GDR was primarily a social movement with wide influence on attitudes and behaviour, and that it was only tenuously linked to party structures.16 So, for some East Germans, joining forces with right-wing radical and ‘national-revolutionary’ groups was relatively easy, because in part the values propagated were familiar from their own training: authoritarian, nationalistic, socialist and anti-capitalist. Influences on the mainstream New Right attitudes are by no means confined to citizens of the former GDR. With some justification, the former secretary general of the CDU, Heiner Geissler, speaking in 1997 in a radio interview, claimed that there has been ‘a renaissance of völkisch thinking in the last six or seven years’. According to Geissler, nationalism was socially ‘à la mode again’. 17 There is evidence to suggest that in recent years some New Right sentiments have indeed been increasingly widely adopted, especially by German conservatives. The CDU and Christlich Soziale Union (CSU) were afraid of

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otherwise losing voters to the main political grouping disseminating NewRight ideas, Franz Schönhuber’s Republikaner. The German conservatives tidied up some of New Right’s manifesto points so that they could be presented in an ‘acceptable’ way. The CSU in particular applied this technique with so much success that in 1998 the Republikaner felt obliged to respond with the slogan, ‘We keep the promises of the CSU’. The CSU pursued a political agenda that was put into words as early as 1968 by the Bavarian politician Franz-Josef Strauss during a party meeting in Bad Reichenhall: ‘One must use the national forces, however reactionary they are’, he argued, ‘that’s what De Gaulle did. Subsequently it’s always possible to ditch them in an elegant way.’ 18 The CSU, which has always been to the right of the larger CDU, has remained loyal to this principle. But thanks to this policy many conservatives also appear to have helped prepare the fertile soil in which right-wing radical and extremist activities could flourish, and some New Right points of view gained a certain respectability. The three clearest examples of New Right influences on the mainstream are the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute), a debate among academics in the mid-1980s on whether the Third Reich was ‘unique’; the ‘asylum debate’ of the early 1990s; and Chancellor Kohl’s initial refusal to recognize the western Polish border. In all three cases it became clear that New Right views were lurking in the background, showing how parts of the New Right agenda were adopted, modified and pursued by conservative politicians. The Historikerstreit originated from Ernst Nolte’s claim that in the totalitarian troika of National Socialism, fascism and MarxismLeninism, National Socialism was a reaction against Stalinism. In Nolte’s view, Communism constituted the ‘original’, and National Socialism was more or less a copy. For Nolte and other New Right authors there was a causal connection between the mass murders of the Russian Revolution and the crimes of Nazi Germany. ‘Auschwitz’, according to this reasoning, was a reaction born of fear in the face of the destructive acts of the Russian Revolution. In other words: Stalin and his regime were partly responsible for the creation of the Third Reich. Hence ‘Auschwitz’ and the ‘Gulag’ were for Nolte more or less equally criminal, apart from the ‘technical procedure of gassing’.19 Nolte reasoned that it might be legitimate to argue that Hitler was entitled to intern German Jews as prisoners-ofwar. Chaim Weizmann had after all announced in September 1939 that Jews all over the world would fight on the side of Britain. These New Right theses led to protests from numerous German commentators. They felt that Nolte and other conservatives were making

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tendentious comparisons for political reasons and were in the process of playing down the genesis and significance of the Third Reich. After the implosion of party Communism, many conservatives behaved like ‘victors of history’, making the alleged ‘normality’ of German developments into their ideological programme. For them the Third Reich was part of a general totalitarian trend in Europe. It is true that Nolte’s views were vigorously challenged by liberal historians and officially condemned by German President Richard von Weizsäcker, who acknowledged the Third Reich to be unique. Nevertheless, the equation of the Third Reich and party Communism, including state Communism in the GDR, now became widely accepted in conservative circles, a connection that can also be seen in the way many conservatives deal with GDR history. In January 2004, for example, the vice-president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dr Salomon Korn, ended the collaboration with the government of Saxony in the Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten, which deals with the redesignation of camps as museums. Some of these former concentrations camps were used first by the Nazis and then, after 1945, by the Soviet Union and the East German government. Korn felt he had to protest against a policy of implied moral equivalence, which placed the political prisoners of the GDR and people persecuted by the Nazis on the same level. He even spoke of a ‘renationalization’ of the work of public commemoration.20 The question of commemoration was already clearly problematized in 1998, when the respected author Martin Walser received the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In Frankfurt’s Paulskirche he argued in front of 1,200 guests that Auschwitz and the National Socialist past, ‘our everlasting shame’ as he put it, were being instrumentalized for ‘current purposes’. He described Auschwitz as a ‘moral bludgeon’ (Moralkeule), used to chastise the Germans, preventing them from being ‘a completely normal people, a very normal society’.21 While his speech received a standing ovation, the late chairman of Germany’s Central Jewish Council, Ignaz Bubis, argued that Walser’s arguments were nothing less than ‘intellectual arson’ (geistige Brandstiftung).22 Indeed, the complaint that Auschwitz was used morally to blackmail the Germans had been a New Right battle cry for many years. What is at stake here is not the ideology of one particular author, but the fact that his views are widely supported by Germany’s cultural, economic and political elites. Encouraged by an atmosphere in which the crimes of the Third Reich are being relativized, ritualized and historicized, CDU-politician Martin Hohmann insinuated on the occasion of the

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celebrations for German Unity Day on 3 October 2003 that Jews could just as well be regarded as a ‘people of perpetrators’ (Tätervolk) as Germans. After all, during the first phase of the Russian Revolution, which cost the lives of millions of people, many Jews were involved in terrorist activities. 23 It is true that, after protests and intense media attention, Hohmann was excluded from his party, but it also became clear that a considerable minority, both inside and outside the CDU, openly supported his views. 24 Another example of the increasing influence of New Right ideology can be seen during the so-called ‘asylum-debate’ in 1991 and 1992.25 After the fall of the Wall a latent xenophobia among sections of the German population turned into an open hatred of foreigners. Not only New Right agitators but also most political parties indulged in invective against asylum-seekers. The most striking example in the conservative camp was the Bavarian politician Edmund Stoiber, who led the CDU/CSU coalition in the national elections of autumn 2002 and almost became chancellor.26 Using the language of the New Right, Stoiber even talked of the threatened miscegenation (Durchmischung and Durchrassung) of the German people.27 Both street-fighters and New Right commentators could feel strengthened by this xenophobic jargon, used by conservative politicians to keep right-wing voters within their own ranks. New Right influences also became clear in the relationship with Poland, especially with regard to the recognition of its western frontier, which was long delayed. In the first instance Chancellor Kohl had bluntly refused to recognize the western Polish frontier. In this matter too he allowed himself to be influenced by New Right views, especially by the Republikaner. In 1990 he allegedly stated to the American ambassador that he was trying to avoid a fixing of the frontier in order to ‘force the Republikaner below five per cent’.28 But perhaps other motives were also involved. On 2 October 1976 Kohl declared in the Ostpreussenblatt that, for the CDU, the Federal Republic is only a part of Germany and that, until there is a peace treaty, Germany continues to have an identity based on its frontiers of 1937. That, argued the Chancellor, included the lost territories of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia.29 This was playing into the hands of the New Right on the part of the CDU and particularly its sister party the CSU. The final recognition of Poland’s western frontier was the result of political pressure from the Allies, which, from a psychological point of view, was regrettable. Since the end of the Second World War, Germany has always maintained that recognition of the frontiers was dependent on the signing of a peace treaty. However, when Germany was given the opportunity, it refused to

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sign such an agreement because, according to the politicians, this was ancient history. Not without some justice the New Right can maintain that a final recognition of frontiers was always made dependent on a peace treaty, and that such an agreement was never made. Needless to say, many Poles felt worried. The Treaty of Friendship that was concluded in 1991 for a period of ten years between Chancellor Kohl and Prime Minister Bielecki did not really dispel this anxiety. For example, an official supplement states emphatically that ‘this Treaty does not engage in questions concerning nationality and property’.30 These ambivalent attitudes do not only apply to Poland. In an official supplement to the treaty of 27 February 1992 between Germany and the Czech and Slovak federal republics, the ministers of foreign affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Jiri Dienstbier, confirmed that possibilities will be created for Germans to settle in the Czech and Slovak republics. They, too, declared emphatically: ‘This treaty does not engage in questions concerning property.’31 Such statements could have been taken straight from the New Right’s basic agenda. The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis of recent trends is that the New Right is making a considerable impact, not only in Germany. Significant parts of its agenda have been taken up by mainstream politicians eager not to be outflanked by extremist parties. It is not entirely clear whether this shift is primarily tactical or signals the emergence of new forms of nationalist politics. Assuming that it is a blend of tactical and ideological elements, this remains a cause for concern. National elections may appear to confirm the stability of German parliamentary democracy, but it is too early to put out the flags, for the results of recent regional elections in the former East German Länder are alarming. In Saxony in September 2004 the neo-fascist Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) received 9.2 per cent of the vote, only 0.5 per cent less than the Social Democrats.32 As the reactionary ideas analysed above begin to be translated into electoral success, the dilemma of the mainstream parties is clear. Whatever the need for tactical concessions, they cannot compromise on essential values with impunity. History has many lessons and this may be one of the most important.

Notes 1 2 3

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For Groupement de Recherche et d’Études sur la Civilisation Européenne, see www.grece-fr.net. All websites were viewed on 28 July 2005. For Thule Seminar, see www.thule-seminar.org/. Thomas Pfeiffer, Die Kultur als Machtfrage: Die Neue Rechte in Deutschland,

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4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

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Innenministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Verfassungsschutz, (Düsseldorf, 2003), 70. Thomas Assheuer and Hans Sarkowicz, Rechtsradikale in Deutschland: Die alte und die neue Rechte (Munich, 1992), 180. Quoted in Verfassungsschutzbericht 1996, published by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Bonn, 1997), 161. All translations from the German are, unless otherwise stated, by the author. Alice Brauner-Orthen, Die neue Rechte in Deutschland: Antidemokratische und rassistische Tendenzen (Opladen, 2001). Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Hamburg, 1933). Pierre Krebs, Das Thule-Seminar : Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft in der Morgenröte des Ethnos (Horn, 1994) 47, quoted in Mathias Brodkorb and Thomas Schmidt, Gibt es einen modernen Rechtsextremismus? Das Fallbeispiel Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Landesbüro Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2002), 19. See also http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/schwerin/01185-br.pdf. Christoph Butterwegge and Horst Isola, Rechtsextremismus im vereinten Deutschland. Randerscheinung oder Gefahr für die Demokratie? (Bremen and Berlin, 1991), 16. Hans-Dietrich Sander, Der nationale Imperativ: Ideengänge und Werkstücke zur Wiederherstellung Deutschlands (Krefeld, 1980), 105. Michael Grossheim, Karlheinz Weissmann and Rainer Zitelmann, Westbindung: Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1993). Texte zur Zeit. Kanonische Erklärung zur Bewegung von 1968, at www.deutscheskolleg.org/oberlercher/texte-zur-zeit/1990-1999/kanonische_erklaerung.pdf. Margaret Feit, Die ‘Neue Rechte’ in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt, 1987), 43, quoted in Assheuer and Sarkowicz, 63. ‘Nation & Europa’, Deutsche Monatshefte, October 1996, 10, quoted in Verfassungsschutzbericht 1996, 148. Feit, 43, quoted in Assheuer and Sarkowicz, 63. See Klaus Farin and Eberhard Seidel-Pielen, Rechtsruck: Rassismus im neuen Deutschland (Berlin, 1992), 82. ‘SPD: Nischen für Extremisten aufspüren’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 December 1997. ‘Etwas dagegenhalten’, Der Spiegel, 16 March 1970, 106–7. Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte’, in Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987), 45. ‘Ein neuer Historikerstreit? Der Historiker Hans Mommsen im Gespräch, Deutschland Radio, 23 January 2004’, available at www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/ kulturheute/229643/?versenden. See ‘Aus der Rede Martin Walsers in der Paulskirche zur Überreichung des Friedenspreises des deutschen Buchhandels in der Frankfurter Paulskirche am 11. Oktober 1998: Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede’, at www. literaturseiten.de/walser.htm. See ‘Der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels’, 20 May 2000, at www. literaturhaus.de/News/News_200500_Friedenspreisdef.htm. Martin Hohmann, ‘Rede zum Nationalfeiertag, 3. Oktober 2003’. The whole speech is available at www.hagalil.com/archiv/2003/11/hohmann-3.htm.

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24 Fritz Schenk, Der Fall Hohmann: Die Dokumentation (Munich, 2004). 25 For further examples, see Jan Herman Brinks, Children of a New Fatherland: Germany’s Post-War Right-Wing Politics (London and New York, 1999), esp. ch. 16. 26 See ‘Der Bundeswahlleiter. Bundestagswahlen’, 22 September 2002, at www. bundeswahlleiter.de/wahlen/btw2002/btwahl_btw2002.htm. 27 Andreas Borchers, Neue Nazis im Osten: Hintergründe und Fakten (Weinheim, 1992), 144. 28 Hajo Funke, ‘Jetzt sind wir dran’: Nationalismus im geeinten Deutschland. Eine Streitschrift (Berlin, 1991), 41. 29 ‘Ostpreußen gehört zu Deutschland’, Das Ostpreußenblatt, 2 October 1976. 30 Thomas Urban, Deutsche in Polen: Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Minderheit (Munich, 1994), 202. 31 See ‘Vertrag zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Tschechischen und Slowakischen Föderativen Republik über gute Nachbarschaft und freundschaftliche Zusammenarbeit’, 27 February 1992, at www. germanembassy.cz/DE/POLITIK_PRESSE/BILAT_BEZ/bstvertrag92_dt.html . 32 ‘Der Sächsische Landtag. Amtliches Endergebnis der 4. Landtagswahl in Sachsen vom 19.09.2004’, available at www.landtag.sachsen.de/slt_online/de/ infothek/index.asp?page=volksvertretung/abgeordnete/wahlergebnisse/.

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RUDOLF HESS AS A ‘MARTYR FOR GERMANY’ The Reinterpretation of Historical Figures in Nationalist Discourse Thomas Dörfler and Andreas Klärner

In 2002 and again in 2003, more than 2,500 neo-Nazis gathered in Wunsiedel, a small town in Franconia’s Fichtelgebirge, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rudolf Hess. These were among the largest neo-Nazi demonstrations in Germany since 1945. Drawing in this paper on our own observations at these ‘Rudolf Hess memorial marches’, we will analyse the significance of Hess for the neo-Nazi movement, showing how the homage paid to a historical figure has contributed to a contemporary political movement. Such reinterpretations influence practical politics as well as academic debate, since political movements frequently use historical figures, their deeds, their characters and their legacies, to legitimate their goals. These ‘derived intentions’ do not necessarily coincide with the intentions of the ‘real’ person to whom they refer. Extreme right-wing groups have shown a marked tendency to rely on such reinterpretations of historical figures, and the profound impact of such figures on nationalistic subcultures is exemplified by the cult of Hess. The extreme right characterizes Hess as a ‘martyr for Germany’, and there are numerous narratives in a variety of media, from books and songs to Internet sites, that amplify this political myth.1 This paper shows how the myth has evolved since 1945 and then analyses ‘Rudolf Hess’ as a mythical figure within nationalistic discourse and at neo-Nazi gatherings. Finally, we will sketch the specific function of the memorial march within contemporary right-wing practices. Hess became deputy to the Führer in 1933 and was an important figure within the Nazi Party (NSDAP) until his departure on a solo flight

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to Great Britain in 1941. He later claimed that the purpose of his independently planned secret mission was to negotiate a separate peace with Great Britain so that Germany would not face fighting a war on two fronts. Hess was unsuccessful; the British government refused to negotiate with him, treating him as an enemy from a country at war. Upon learning that Hess had failed, Hitler declared his former deputy and faithful companion insane. Hess was held prisoner in Britain until the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and sentenced there to life imprisonment. He served this sentence in the Allied prison in Berlin-Spandau; from 1966 until his death by suicide in 1987, he was the only prisoner held there.2 Even these meagre facts about Hess are the subject of controversy, especially within right-wing discourse. The only assertions that are generally undisputed are that Hess flew to Britain in 1941 and was captured there by local police and members of the British secret service, was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 1987. This leaves ample scope for interpretation, as will be seen from the following analysis.3 The origins of the myth Rudolf Hess himself laid the foundation for his own myth during the Nuremberg Trials, as this was his first opportunity after having been taken prisoner to speak ‘freely’ and to justify his actions during the Third Reich. He presented himself as an unrepentant National Socialist, who nonetheless was not involved in any crimes during his years as one of the leading figures in the NSDAP. His final words at the trial have become famous: I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my country has brought forth in its thousand-year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.4 Due to Hess’s behaviour during the trial and his ‘heroic’ statement, sections of the German public soon treated him as a unique personality, someone whose demeanour in court differed markedly from the ‘normal’

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behaviour of those who stood trial. Hess acquired charisma, to use Max Weber’s term, and this affected the reporting of the event in the national and international press. 5 Indeed, even while the Nuremberg Trials were still being conducted, efforts were under way to portray Hess as a victim or martyr. Politicians, journalists and lawyers repeatedly wrote about Rudolf Hess and sought to discredit the Nuremberg Trials as a farce or an inquisitorial tribunal.6 These contemporary publications reveal that some parts of the German (and indeed international) public considered the war crimes trials to be an act of revenge against the German Volk, a view that has persisted in certain circles even to the present. For those who characterized the trials as the morally biased and reprehensible ‘justice of the victors’, Hess’s performance at the trial provided confirmation for their standpoint.7 This inspired the invention of numerous legends about his deeds and his behaviour at Nuremberg. One of the most influential creators of such myths was Hess’s defence attorney at Nuremberg, Alfred Seidl.8 In a number of publications, Seidl defended Hess’s flight to England, asserting that, since Hess had tried to negotiate a peace treaty, he should be regarded as an ‘ambassador of peace’.9 Mobilizing the media Over the years, numerous popular books about Hess’s life, his flight to England and his death have been published.10 Many of these books are poorly written portraits of a heroic man seeking peace, a tough pilot and a bit of a daredevil, or simply a ‘good Nazi’ and living proof of the ‘fact’ that, at the core, this system was neither aggressive nor belligerent. In their descriptions of the flight, these books frequently make use of Hess’s own words. The historian David Irving, recently censured in court for denying that the Nazi regime made systematic use of gas chambers, contributed substantially to the legend with his Hess biography, published in 1987.11 But the central figures in the effort to rehabilitate Rudolf Hess were his wife, Ilse Hess, and his only son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess. Beginning in the mid-1960s, both campaigned to create public pressure for the release of Hess, winning widespread support. More than 350,000 people signed a petition launched by the Relief Committee ‘Freedom for Rudolf Hess’ (Hilfsgemeinschaft ‘Freiheit für Rudolf Hess’), calling for his release from prison, including numerous public figures such as physicists Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, writers Ernst Jünger and Carl Zuckmayer, Pastor Martin Niemoeller and the former West German presidents Gustav Heinemann and Richard von Weizsäcker.12 Wolf Rüdiger

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and Ilse Hess also published several books about Hess, some of which appeared under pseudonyms, together with selections from his correspondence.13 Indeed, the son made every possible attempt to rehabilitate his father and to portray him as a peace-loving and unjustly imprisoned man. Hess was successful in winning German historian Golo Mann, as the author of a foreword to one of these volumes, writes that ‘he [Hess] was not a man of war, such a passionate friend of nature just could not have been that at all’.14 Thus even a reputable historian would seem to have endorsed the son’s perspective on his father. The Rudolf Hess Society (Rudolf-Hess-Gesellschaft e.V.), founded by his son, uses the Internet to disseminate the same views. The society’s website—www.meinungsfreiheit.de, thus identifying itself with ‘freedom of opinion’—purportedly provided users with ‘neutral’ facts about the life and death of Hess. 15 A primary aim is to cast doubt on the official version of the suicide of Hess in 1987. According to the ‘evidence’ presented on the website, Rudolf Hess was ‘murdered’ by the Allies in the Spandau prison. The disclaimer on the website reads as follows: ‘This is a non-political site. We do not take part in or support any neo-Nazi activities!’ This statement aims to create the impression that the website is a reliable source for historical research and supplies validated facts. But doubts about this supposedly ‘non-political’ position were fuelled in 2001, when Wolf Rüdiger Hess, just two months before his death, sent greetings to the ‘comrades’ gathered in Wunsiedel. Moreover, his letter was read to those attending the rally by one of Germany’s leading neo-Nazis, Jürgen Rieger. Another prominent and seemingly unlikely supporter was Rudolf Augstein, then publisher of the German weekly Der Spiegel. A Hess obituary penned by Augstein in 1987 characterized him as the first and foremost representative of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance movement.16 Precisely because Der Spiegel is not usually regarded as a forum for Holocaust deniers or for right-wing views in general, this may be a telling example of how the myth has spread from Holocaust-denial discourse into the mainstream media. For the militant neo-Nazi-movement, pop music is a favoured medium for conveying a ‘positive’ or mystical image of Rudolf Hess. Innumerable songs about Hess, ranging from skinhead rock songs to ballads, have been performed and disseminated. One of these songs, ‘Rudolf Hess’ by the neo-Nazi band Wolfsrudel (Wolf Pack), includes the following lyrics: Facing the tribunal of vengeance, they expected him to betray allegiance.

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But he remained loyal and said: ‘I regret nothing.’ The judges threatened him, but for Rudolf Hess, it was easy: ‘I’m obliged only to God and the Reich.’ Rudolf Hess is our ideal for all time. Every year we pay homage to his memory, we stride side by side. The music to the song is emotionally charged, in a rather melancholy vein. The lyrics ascribe to Hess the qualities of loyalty, perseverance and a ‘no regrets’ attitude, portraying him as a role model for young neo-Nazis. The last line of the refrain—‘every year we pay homage to his memory, we stride side by side’—is a reference to the annual demonstrations held in his honour. Here, music serves as a medium for disseminating propaganda: Hess’s alleged ‘fate’ is linked to a call for political action that must follow from his life and death. Since 1987, these ‘commemorative’ acts have become an integral part of the German neo-Nazi movement’s schedule, with demonstrations of varying size and other propaganda activities launched each year around the day of Hess’s death in August. The following sections will focus on these activities in greater detail. Drawing on our own observations at these memorial marches, we will analyse the significance of Rudolf Hess for the (German) neo-Nazi movement and how the process of paying homage to a historical figure has contributed to the constitution of a contemporary political movement. The Rudolf Hess memorial march In 1987, neo-Nazis gathered for the first time at the cemetery where Rudolf Hess is buried in the small German town of Wunsiedel to commemorate the anniversary of his death. 17 By 1990, more than a thousand right-wing demonstrators were participating in the annual march. Following bans on further marches from 1991 to 2001, neo-Nazis attempted to organize events in other towns and cities in Germany, Denmark and Luxemburg. Following a marked decline in the number of participants due to heavy police repression, a significant change in prevailing case law with respect to political demonstrations in 2001 had far-reaching consequences. Legal safeguards for political demonstrations as an exercise of the constitutional right to free speech were enhanced, so that court orders prohibiting neo-Nazi demonstrations became difficult to obtain. The 2001 march in Wunsiedel was ruled legal and attracted over 900 followers of the neoNazi movement. Right-wing organizations perceived this as a breakthrough and succeeded in mobilizing 2,500 neo-Nazis from all over Western Europe in 2002 and an even higher number in 2003.

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The efforts undertaken annually by neo-Nazis to ensure that the march can take place at Hess’s place of burial, despite the hurdles erected by the administrative authorities and the courts, underline its significance. They represent tenacious attempts to ritualise the event, in order to create and reinforce the internal cohesion of the neo-Nazi scene. Such gatherings draw their meaning from their specific performativity, as cohesion is ‘made’ on a physical or, more precisely, corporal basis, requiring the actual presence of like-minded people. This is the chief reason why the Hess Memorial March is a unique and important activity within the neo-Nazi subculture: such communities cannot be established ‘virtually’. The ‘real’ presence of others is indispensable as a means of evoking a factual sense of community, as Emile Durkheim put it in his analysis of religious gatherings: ‘To strengthen those sentiments which, if left to themselves, would soon weaken, it is sufficient to bring those who hold them together and to put them into closer and more active relations with one another.’18 In the following reconstruction of the 2002 event, we shall see how the historical images of Rudolf Hess as a nationalist myth manifest themselves in a concrete, contemporary subcultural practice. Furthermore, we will be able to recognize how instrumentalizing a historical figure in conjunction with a popular myth may shape a social community, expressing aspirations and perspectives for the future. This approach will enable us to analyse the myth of Rudolf Hess not only in relation to actors who stubbornly cling to myths derived from the past (the so-called Ewiggestrige), but also as a problem for the future. We begin by discussing the event itself. Political dramaturgy Jürgen Rieger officially opened the 2002 march by referring to the catastrophic flood that was affecting Eastern Europe and some parts of Eastern Germany at the time of the demonstration.19 ‘To honour Rudolf Hess means, first and foremost, putting national solidarity into practice!’, he declared.20 He called upon his ‘comrades’ living near the disaster area not to participate in the Wunsiedel march, but to join the struggle against the flood on the ‘frontline for protecting the homeland’ (Heimatschutzfront). Thus the flood disaster was defined by the nationalists as a threat to the homeland, to Germany’s very existence. As a nationalist, one must defend the homeland by all means, and Rieger appealed to his fellow nationalists to act together to combat a severe threat to Germany. This notion of working together to save the homeland is a renewal of the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, aimed at creating a feeling of solidarity among participants. Moreover, ‘national

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solidarity’ in this sense is not a part-time arrangement from which one can easily withdraw. Practising national solidarity calls for a total commitment, involving the nationalist’s body, as well as his (or her) mind. To stand on the dike and carry sandbags is one way of realizing the imagined community of the Volksgemeinschaft. In his address, Rieger referred to the requirements for ‘being national’, implying a special attitude towards the nationalist cause and a specific world view (Weltanschauung). The next contribution to the programme of the march confirms this perspective, albeit by different means, and can therefore be regarded as a second phase within the dramaturgy of the event. Music plays a significant role in the expression of patriotic myths, and Rieger was followed by Michael Müller, a nationalist folksinger and songwriter. In his songs Müller combines a mythology of the nationalist movement with a highly emotional performance. In Wunsiedel he employed potent symbolic images designed to evoke nationalist sentiments. His songs were charged with tragic phrases and lamentations about a great loss, but also expressed a rather morbid fighting spirit and confidence in the just nature of the nationalist cause. The songwriter’s texts strive to provide answers to the crucial questions that nearly all political communities face: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we heading? These answers are woven into mythical narratives portraying specific events in Germany’s history: the trauma of the First World War, defeat in the Second World War and the injustice of Nuremberg. These motifs serve as an illustration of the movement’s underlying ideas and present these ideas as facts or, to use Jeanne Hersch’s term, ‘effective fiction’.21 The theme of one of Müller’s songs, ‘Siegerjustiz’ (Justice of the Victors), deserves special attention.22 Verse 1 You call yourself judges, but you are executioners deaf to the voice of conscience You hate the Volk of poets and thinkers You want us to kneel with Germany in the dust before you. Refrain You are prisoners of your own deeds for which you too, one day will have to pay Our Nuremberg lies behind us You still have to experience yours, experience yours Your Nuremberg is yet to come

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Verse 3 You can leave the verdict unopened We already know that we are done for But once from our ashes there will rise The avengers of this murder. The song’s tone is tragic and characterized by feelings of grief, indignation and defiance, but it is also quite fanatical in its references to the return of the avengers. Müller identifies himself and the march participants with the war criminals convicted at Nuremberg and, surprisingly, appears to accept ‘symbolically’ their punishment. How can we interpret this unexpected acceptance? The answer relates to the construction of a ‘community of fate’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). This common fate of the German Volk is defined by the fact that it was defeated in the Second World War and now has to bear the consequences. The ‘punishment’ of the Germans at the hands of the victors of the Second World War is seen as an injustice and a humiliation. But the message of the song would seem to be that this humiliation gives the neo-Nazis a paradoxical power. From their perspective, this humiliation empowers their actions, because they have gone through a kind of ‘degradation’ and have symbolically ‘survived’ it. Now they can fight without looking back, without being bound to material goods. On the contrary, not the nationalists, but rather the defenders of democracy, the liberals and ‘anti-Germans’, are the ones who have something to lose. It is their post-war order that is threatened by these nationalists. With this construction, the (imagined) role of the victim adopted by the neo-Nazis can be reinterpreted as that of the future avenger. In the words of the song—‘Our Nuremberg lies behind us/ You still have to experience yours’—lies a promise of redress for Müller’s followers. Those who assume the role of the victim will receive compensation in the form of reparation for the injustice they have supposedly experienced. The song thus provides these self-defined victims with a utopian vision, a desire to be one day on the winning side. The narrative is not only one of a more or less glorious but unfortunate past, but also about a potentially glorious future struggle. Although some critics assume that the nationalists’ cause is focused on the past, these lyrics suggest that an uncanny power can emerge from humiliating ‘experience’ and be transformed into a new heroic narrative. In contrast to perceptions of right-wingers frequently expressed in mainstream public media, we do not believe that followers of the extreme right should be regarded as backward. Instead, they represent a political

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movement that struggles to achieve utopian goals in the future.23 We should recognize the internalized reward structure of right-wing ideology as reconstructed above: the death of a ‘hero’, which inspires the struggle against ‘official historiography’ as a means of redressing violations of ‘human rights’ in the past. Not to do so would be to misconceive the powerful appeal of these ideological dynamics and their implications for the future. A movement that offers a positive Weltanschauung based on strong moral principles will presumably attract more potential followers (especially young people), even if they are reluctant to participate in ‘classic’ (and often violent) right-wing extremist practices. This aspect will become clearer as we turn to the final phase of this political dramaturgy, the talk given by Wolfgang Juchem, a former member of the German military secret service. Following these musical contributions, Wolfgang Juchem, a well-known right-winger, appeared on stage. 24 Juchem’s talk laid the foundation for the rest of the day’s events, supplying the crowd in Wunsiedel with a rewritten history of Rudolf Hess and his deeds. Beginning by echoing Müller and others, Juchem claimed that Germany is still under siege: ‘enemies’, who were not named explicitly, have taken over ‘our’ country and produced a kind of ‘left’ ideology, claiming, for example, that Germany is multicultural, multi-ethnic, tolerant and so on. Moreover, the speaker continued, the same ‘self-proclaimed democrats’ disparage the Rudolf Hess memorial march as a ‘politically incorrect’ event. Since 1945, they have produced ‘fairy tales’ about the Third Reich and tried to impose their idea of Germany through the media and through ‘orgies of re-education’. But this Germany—the Germany of the non-patriots, the traitors—is an unstable construct according to Juchem’s assessment. In the near future, he explained, upright Germans and all others who have resisted this brainwashing will learn the real ‘truth’ about the country that lies behind the official truth. This assembly of upright Germans proves that ‘fifty years of brainwashing’ have been unsuccessful. The Wunsiedel gathering is, in this view, an indication that the nationalists were justified in maintaining their beliefs over the years. The proof lies for Juchem in ‘the sheer mass of participants’ standing together and paying homage to Hess, who are morally superior to the majority of ‘brainwashed Germans’. Their position is legitimated by the deeds of Rudolf Hess who, like the comrades present, is a ‘representative of decent, of German Germany’. The apparently tautological phrase ‘German Germany’ implies a fundamental differentiation. The task of creating a national community has become more complex as a consequence of immigration. In the era

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of the ‘post-national constellation’ (Habermas), nationalists can no longer rely on formal affiliation via nationality. They are forced to accept, not willingly but rather unconsciously, the fact that migrants and their children live in Germany and can attain German citizenship. And, obviously, representatives of the left, the media and other objects of nationalist paranoia are also Germans. The category ‘German’ is therefore too vague. In addressing the ‘German Germans’, Juchem implicitly excludes the ‘nonGerman Germans’ mentioned above. This provides the nationalists with a meta-differentiation and enables them to perceive themselves as the true defenders of the German cause. It is Rudolf Hess who represents the fantasy of a ‘German Germany’. In Juchem’s words, he is a ‘guiding light for a better mankind’, because he wanted to prevent ‘peaceful Germany’ from fighting a war and thus, had he succeeded, would have averted the catastrophic outcome of the Second World War. Above all, he unerringly planned and pursued his mission and risked his life to the bitter end. Hess, from a nationalist’s point of view, did this in a heroic manner. Juchem’s speech portrayed Hess’s flight in exhaustive detail: Hess flew ‘only one meter above the waves’, ‘avoided English radar’ and ‘parachuted down from a height of 2,000 meters above sea level, although he had never done anything like that before’. Juchem pronounced this a ‘gentleman-like deed’, claiming that ‘for no other person would the Nobel Peace Prize be more appropriate’. What can we learn from this regressive desire for a heroic saga? Obviously, there is a basic need within the extreme right for a noble, unselfish hero. The extreme-right movement aims to embody what is morally good and to present itself as a movement that represents the interests of ‘German Germans’. For Juchem and his followers, identifying with this myth is attractive because Hess embodies the fate of the whole German Volk and is thus an ideal for every German nationalist. The ritual of the silent march The final element of the demonstration in Wunsiedel was the so-called ‘march of remembrance’ (Gedenkmarsch), conducted by the neo-Nazis in a highly ritualized manner. Participants carried simple black banners and, at the front of the march, a banner reading ‘We honour the memory of Rudolf Hess’. Behind it, neo-Nazis strode silently, slowly and in orderly rows. None of the participants shouted slogans and no one drank, cheered or even talked. At first glance, the apparent discipline of the participants might seem unexpected, but it provides a key to understanding the event. This disciplined behaviour underlined the marchers’ aforementioned

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desire to appear ‘good’ and to avoid the kind of violence that seems to be characteristic of their most odious political enemy, the far left. There was, however, one moment when this strategy almost came to grief, revealing a great deal about the nature of the event. As the procession reached the market place in Wunsiedel, where some anti-fascist demonstrators were shouting slogans like ‘Nazis out!’, ‘Down with the Nazi plague!’ or ‘Education for all—even for you!’, a small group of neo-Nazis began to yell back. They were immediately stopped by one of their own officials with a megaphone, who reminded them: ‘Hey, we are mourning!’ The neo-Nazi crowd instantly resumed their silent march. This scene highlights the ritualized character of the event, with participants disciplining themselves or one another. For the individual participant this behaviour expresses—and here again we follow Durkheim‘s analysis of religious rituals— ‘a ritual attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in a large measure, independent of his affective state’.25 Herein lies the appeal of the event: at this unique, emotional and very ‘straight’ gathering, right-wing extremist groups from all over Germany and Europe can temporarily form a community that transcends their daily life and enhances their perception of their political and moral role. In other words, the ritualized procession is a performative act that presents and creates the participants’ collectivity. And, so they claim, this is a collectivity of the morally superior ‘good’ Germans. Conclusions In conclusion, we would like to summarize what we consider to be the decisive insights derived from the setting and conduct of the Rudolf Hess memorial march. The gathering The establishment of an existential political community requires, first and foremost, a gathering of like-minded people. This performative act is an essential prerequisite for evoking a sense of collectivity among the participants, who can ‘feel’ their community by assembling. As Durkheim put it: There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being

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closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments. 26 This also corresponds to the concept of emotional community-building (emotionale Vergemeinschaftung) as formulated by Max Weber.27 Thus, the memorial march, as a ritualized gathering, is definitely the most important such event within the Ger man right-wing movement and a fundamental element in the formation of the movement. The rewriting of history In contrast to rational historical and political research, the German nationalist movement aims to subvert the more or less ‘modern’ approach to historical occurrences that relies on proof, fact and reason. According to their hermetic and ‘paranoid’ reading, post-national historians have been robbed of their ‘truth’. They conclude that the facts of official history are false, since they are linked to a ‘hierarchical’ system of ‘anti-German’ resentment in a world dominated by the United States or the ‘Allies’. This ideologically coloured standpoint is linked to an all-too familiar conspiracy theory, which claims that the ‘false democrats’ controlling the media and political life aim to hide the ‘real truth’ about Germany. Obviously, the neo-Nazi movement does its best to overthrow this order. And since ‘official’ politics strives to conceal this truth, all of the movement’s energy must be galvanized to resist this alliance of the media and the political system. This was the key political message of the Wunsiedel gathering. The common desire to resist the prevailing political order is instrumental in mobilizing those assembled to participate in political actions, and this mobilization remains one of the major goals of the far-right movement as a whole. Hess as an embodiment of the moral good The decisive conclusion that can be drawn from this reconstruction of the memorial march is that ‘Rudolf Hess’ personifies an emotional point of orientation for the neo-Nazi movement in its desire to perform as the representative of the ‘moral good’ in political discourse. The neo-Nazi movement utilizes Hess as a ‘positive’ figure in the fight against the purportedly ‘false history’ propagated by political orthodoxy. Supporters of the far right can claim that their actions are founded on ethical beliefs derived from the legitimate actions of this person, claiming that Hess is a guiding light for the movement, and even, as Juchem has declared, for ‘a better mankind’. This indicates a deep-seated desire for a ‘good’ role model

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within the nationalist subculture. Since nationalist and neo-National Socialist ideology is not a ‘positive’ movement, in so far as it always excludes some people and also attracts a variety of rowdies and criminals, this search for positive figures is understandable. The prospects for winning new followers would appear to increase if a movement offers a kind of ‘freedom fighter’ serving a ‘legitimate’ cause. Thus Hess has become a kind of Ché Guevara for the extreme right. This perspective helps us to understand the effectiveness of the movement. The followers of the new right are not ‘defective’, ‘sick’ or ‘backward’ people who need to compensate for personal problems or inferiority complexes by acting within a group. Rather, they represent a well-organized, highly effective and thus threatening movement of those who consider themselves to be ‘the good’. Since the supporters of this movement already perceive themselves as superior in terms of morality, confronting them with moral arguments is likely to be counterproductive. What makes this movement so effective is, first, its instrumentalization of various popular media, such as the Internet or folksongs, to disseminate its ideology; second, its installation of Rudolf Hess as a kind of moral beacon; and third, its establishment of the Rudolf Hess memorial march as an annual performative event that serves to create and reaffirm right-wing ideology and community, and to forge an effective political collective. Recognizing these mechanisms is an essential prerequisite to understanding the success of nationalist movements in recent years and to developing adequate responses to the challenge they pose.

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See Andreas Dörner, Politischer Mythos und symbolische Politik (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1996), 13–62. See Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weissbecker, Rudolf Hess: Der Mann an Hitlers Seite (Leipzig, 1999). See also Michael Kohlstruck, ‘Gerettete Idole? Rudolf Hess, Gregor und Otto Strasser, Albert Speer’, in Wolfgang Benz and Peter Reif-Spirek (eds), Geschichtsmythen: Legenden über den Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 2003), 87–114. The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Two Hundred and Sixteenth Day: Saturday, 31th August, 1946, vol. 22, 384f. See, for example, Gregor von Rezzori’s courtroom report of 1946, ‘Das Schlusswort von Rudolf Hess’, in Steffen Radlmaier (ed.), Der Nürnberger Lernprozess (Frankfurt, 2001), 287 ff. See Pätzold and Weissbecker, 312 ff. See, for example, Peter Dehoust (ed.), Heuchler, Henker, Halunken: Der Nürnberger Prozess vor 50 Jahren (Coburg, 1996).

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Seidl later became leader of the parliamentary group of the Christian Social Union (CSU) in the Bavarian Parliament (1972–4), State Secretary in the Ministry of Justice (1974–7) and Bavarian Minister of the Interior (1977–8). Seidl was also present at the secret funeral organized by Hess’s family in March 1988. Alfred Seidl, Der verweigerte Friede: Deutschlands Parlamentär Rudolf Hess muss schweigen (Frankfurt, 1986); see also Pätzold and Weissbecker, 311 ff. and 362 ff. See, for example, James Leasor, Rudolf Hess: The Uninvited Envoy (London, 1962) and Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess (New York, 1979). David Irving, Hess: The Missing Years (London, 1987). See Pätzold and Weissbecker, 349 f. See, by Wolf Rüdiger Hess: Rudolf Hess: ‘Ich bereue nichts’ (Graz and Stuttgart, 1994); Mord an Rudolf Hess? Der geheimnisvolle Tod meines Vaters in Spandau (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1989); Rudolf Hess: Briefe 1908–1933 (Munich and Vienna, 1987); Mein Vater Rudolf Hess: Englandflug und Gefangenschaft (Munich and Vienna, 1984); and Hess, weder Recht noch Menschlichkeit: Das Urteil von Nürnberg, die Rache in Spandau—eine Dokumentation (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1974). See, by Ilse Hess: Antwort aus Zelle Sieben: Briefwechsel mit dem Spandauer Gefangenen (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1967); Neue Briefe aus Spandau: Gefangener des Friedens (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1955); England—Nürnberg—Spandau: Ein Schicksal in Briefen (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1952). Golo Mann, ‘Vorwort’, in Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Rudolf Hess: ‘Ich bereue nichts’, 12. All translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the authors. Information from DENIC, operator of the primary name server for the top level domain DE (29 August 2002). Pätzold and Weißbecker, 366; see also Der Spiegel, no. 35, 1987, 86. For a chronology of the Rudolf Hess memorial marches, see Patrick O’Hara and Daniel Schlüter (eds), Der Mythos stirbt zuletzt: Neonazistisches Gedenken, der Kriegsverbrecher Rudolf Hess, antifaschistische Diskussion (Hamburg, 2002). Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London, 1976), 210. On Jürg en Rieg er, see Jens Mecklenburg (ed.), Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus (Berlin, 1996), 513 f., and Thomas Grumke and Bernd Wagner (eds), Handbuch Rechtsradikalismus (Opladen, 2002), 300 ff. ‘Rudolf Hess ehren heisst in erster Linie: Nationale Solidarität üben!’, available at www.widerstandnord.com/wunsiedel2002/presse.htm (viewed 15 August 2002). See Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, Die Entstehung der faschistischen Ideologie: Von Sorel zu Mussolini (Hamburg, 1999), 79; and Dörner, 44. Original German lyrics by the well-known neo-Nazi folksinger Frank Rennicke. See Dörner, 57 f. On Wolfgang Juchem, see Mecklenburg (ed.), 478. Durkheim, 397. Ibid., 427. Emotionale Vergemeinschaftung is a social relationship that, according to Weber, is founded on a subjectively felt (affective or traditional) sense of belonging between those involved. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1980), 21 ff., 141 and 527 ff.

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THE HOLOCAUST AND INFOTAINMENT An Analysis of Guido Knopp’s Television Series Holokaust Michael Elm

Guido Knopp’s documentary films about National Socialism, featured by German television since the early 1990s, have had a significant impact on public opinion. Knopp became well known in Germany for presenting the Nazi period and the Holocaust to a broader audience. This aim, so his supporters argue, justified him in simplifying certain issues. On the other hand, he has been criticized for trivializing the German past by using pseudo-authentic pictures or exploiting the subject in order to achieve thrilling effects. The series Holokaust, which forms the main focus of this paper, was broadcast in Germany in October 2000. The six episodes, entitled ‘Menschenjagd’ (Hunting People Down), ‘Entscheidung’ (The Decision), ‘Ghetto’ (The Ghetto), ‘Mordfabrik’ (Murder Factory), ‘Widerstand’ (Resistance) and ‘Befreiung’ (Liberation) are similarly structured. The pre-title sequence provides an introduction to the specific subject of the episode and lasts about two minutes. This is followed by the introduction to the whole series and the documentary itself, which lasts forty minutes. The series has been distributed worldwide. British, American, Australian, Dutch and Austrian television stations were involved in the production, and it has been sold to many other countries. In Germany it attracted an audience of over two million, which is low compared with some of Knopp’s other productions, but still rather impressive for a treatment of this subject. To see the significance of this series in the context of German discourse on the Holocaust, it is necessary to recall certain details about the production. Internationally acclaimed historians, including Yehuda Bauer,

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Ian Kershaw, Christopher Browning, Eberhard Jäckel and Peter Longerich, were involved as consultants, and Simon Wiesenthal agreed to be the patron of the series. Thus the series can be understood as an attempt by the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), a well-regarded public broadcasting station, to gain recognition from a wider audience and even from the academic community. This attempt also finds a politico-cultural expression in the new spelling of the term ‘Holocaust’, written with a ‘k’ instead of a ‘c’. In the book published to accompany the series, Knopp explains that the new spelling implies German responsibility for the Holocaust and the Second World War, by contrast with the more familiar AngloSaxon spelling that internationalizes those events. In the preface to the book he argues that the new spelling should be included in the Rechtschreibreform (the general reform of spelling rules pertaining to the German language) that was being introduced at the time.1 The Holokaust series can be seen as one of the most ambitious projects on this issue ever produced in Germany.2 The need to take responsibility for the past, as indicated by the new spelling in the title, is a well-established theme in German official pronouncements. In both German states that emerged from the Second World War, there was a gap between views expressed in public and those held in private, and it is this discrepancy that underlies the German debate about the Holocaust.3 While public opinion is usually articulated through the representatives of the political class and orientated in accordance with the rules of the international community, private views contain a wide range of divergent attitudes, including both radical and revisionist positions. The desire to reach a consensus about the Nazi past and to heal the wounds within German national identity has increased since unification, and especially since the takeover of power by the Social Democratic-Green Party coalition in 1998 under the leadership of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Knopp’s series can be seen as a conscious attempt to establish a new Holocaust narrative, taking account of specific German circumstances. In an article on the treatment of history in the medium of television, published in 1988, Knopp wrote: ‘Patriotism without trauma is thinkable only if it includes Auschwitz.’ And he went on to say: We Germans struggle much harder, compared to other Europeans, with answers to questions about who we are, where we come from, and what has happened to us. This is due to our ‘burdensome heritage’ (lästige Erbschaft)—to the dictatorship of Hitler and the Holocaust. Others, like the Americans, the British and the

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French, have an easier relation to their past or make it easier for themselves.4 From this it is clear that mastering the past is conceived as a means of regaining a stronger national identity for Germany and that Knopp sees the Holocaust as an obstacle to be overcome if this process is to be successful. The task is to create a narrative framework strong enough to subsume the horrific events of the war in a new model of German national identity. Another reason for the impact of Knopp’s productions is identified in Wulf Kantsteiner’s excellent studies of the development of what he calls the ‘Knopp school’. It was the competition between public and private television stations, Kantsteiner argues, that led to the creation of new forms of visual narrative, avoiding the static effect of ‘talking heads’ by using short sequences, rapid cross-cutting and dramatic music to create an aura of authenticity. During the early 1990s the ratings of ZDF dropped sharply, but Knopp responded by developing new techniques that were so successful that several of his productions attracted an audience of four million viewers. His first fully realized historical docu-drama in the new style was Der verdammte Krieg (The Accursed War), produced in 1991. According to Kantsteiner, this presented Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, as if it were a sporting encounter, with Hitler and Stalin as the ‘cranky team chiefs’: As with all good sport events, the competition is ultimately decided by chance. An untimely uprising in Yugoslavia, the early onset of winter with mud and snow, betrayal by spies, and the repeated irrational decisions of the Führer seal the fate of the German team. For German viewers this approach sets in motion a string of attractive counterfactuals: What if the attack had been earlier, the winter later, or the Führer brighter? These questions and their answers, clearly implied by the films, expose the not so hidden centre of gravity of the whole undertaking. The ‘we’ in ‘we would have won’ is right below the attractive visual surface and even more powerful because that affirmative ‘we’ in relation to the Second World War has no place in the official culture of the Federal Republic.5 This approach elicited a striking reaction from certain viewers, who suggested that Knopp should take a closer look at the theory that Operation Barbarossa was not an aggressive but a preventive war. Thus, there is a

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certain confirmation of Kantsteiner’s assessment that the revisionist myth, although not explicitly presented, is at least implicit in Knopp’s handling of the contradiction between the ‘politically correct’ commentary and the sporting narrative, with its evocative use of a patriotic German ‘we’. This highlights a very sensitive element in the evolving collective memory of Germany, and Knopp’s appeal to the subtle shifts in public consciousness that have occurred in recent years helps to explain the success of his work. The rising ratings achieved by Knopp’s docu-dramas helped him to emerge as a leading ZDF ‘brand’ in competition with the commercial television stations. Almost every year since 1991 his production team has presented a new historical series, and in 1997 the documentaries were broadcast during prime time. Thus commercial competition was certainly a stimulus for the development of the new style. But Kantsteiner, like other critics, suggests that there is a qualitative difference between those earlier productions and Holokaust, Guido Knopp’s most ambitious television series. This difference, they maintain, is reflected in the following features: the documentary pictures are well researched and the commentary on the voice-over is historically accurate; there are no pseudo-historical shots with actors and only a few pictures with a hand-held camera; and Knopp’s team spent two years on research in various Central and East European archives, which became possible after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Although there is some substance in Kantsteiner’s view, appearances are deceptive. The counter-argument to be advanced in this paper is that the features responsible for the success of Knopp’s earlier productions can be found in Holokaust as well. The first important point is that cooperation with the acclaimed historians was little more than a critical gesture, consisting of elements taken from the recent debates on the Holocaust, especially concerning the history of the perpetrators, as discussed in the 1990s. Questions are raised through the voice-over such as: What did the ordinary German people know about the extermination of the Jews? Could they have resisted it? Were the Germans ‘willing executioners’, as suggested by Daniel Goldhagen in the book that provoked such an acrimonious debate? Such questions are certainly important, but they were posed rather superficially without altering the traditional Hitler-centred explanation of the Holocaust. A typical example of how that Hitler-centred explanation functions can be seen at the beginning of the second episode, ‘Entscheidung’, dealing with the decision that led to the ‘final solution’. Here, we are shown

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documentary pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers in combat. The scene is underscored with thrilling music. The voice-over explains: ‘Hitler’s war in the East—war of extermination, even behind the frontline: with perpetrators and white-collar criminals.’ Then there is a fade-out to a statement by Karl-Heinz Hass, a former member of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Security Office). As suggested through the comment by the voice-over, we are expecting to see an Eichmann-like perpetrator. Hass is referring to the Einsatzgruppen, the execution squads responsible for the ethnic cleansing behind the frontlines. But he is an untypical eyewitness in the context of Knopp’s series, for he is stuttering and citing a former companion, who told him that it was good not to belong to one of the ‘Einsatzgruppen’: ‘It’s a cruel but necessary task . . .’; Hass’s sentence is continued by the voice-over (the intonation quieter and more resigned): ‘ . . . which is carried out in his sense’ (the allusion is to Hitler, whose presence is often signalled not by his name, but by the pronouns ‘he’ or ‘him’). The tense atmosphere produced by the information that the viewer is seeing, a perpetrator, is displaced by the compelling image of Hitler, who is declared to be responsible. Meanwhile we see pictures from the newsreel showing Hitler at the front in August 1941. He is strolling along a row of soldiers who are greeting him, a little dog barking at his feet. These propaganda pictures are not identified as such. The music in this scene has a threatening and tragic sound; from time to time we hear a slight percussion. The voice-over continues with a solemn intonation: ‘these soldiers were to conquer “Lebensraum”, where there is no space for Jews . . . mass murder. Soldiers become witnesses.’ A report from a former Wehrmacht soldier follows. He is talking about the shooting of a little boy. This ordinary soldier is introduced as an eyewitness of the events, but no question is asked as to why he was there and what was the function of his unit. Thus, German soldiers, although initially introduced as perpetrators, are transformed into mere eyewitnesses of the killings behind the frontline. It is Hitler who is responsible. This explanation is conveyed not simply by the spoken commentary, but by a subtle montage of documentary film, the evocative music and the suggestive intonations of the voice-over. A second difficulty arises from the treatment of the relationship between the individual and society, above all the bonding between Volk and Führer. This relationship is presented in moralizing terms without any understanding of the emotional bonds that strengthened the relationship between the German population and the Nazi elite (so memorably analysed by critical psychologists).6 The television series Holokaust accentuates the

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gulf between a demonic leadership and ordinary soldiers, who appear as eyewitnesses or bystanders, rather than perpetrators. Knopp’s series reflects a specific aspect of German collective memory, especially that of the second and third generations that currently hold positions of power. Many of their parents (or grandparents) felt betrayed by Hitler, but were unable to articulate their emotions, which were transmitted to their children without being resolved. Of course, there are many different strategies for coming to terms with the Holocaust from the perspective of different generations. One of the most important—and most seductive—is recognizable in Knopp’s series: the betrayal by the Führer of the German people, who have put their trust in him. Hitler is condemned as if he were a father who abandoned his children. No wonder some commentators see these documentaries as an honest expression of German collective memory. The central problem of Holokaust is that it reiterates this set of assumptions, rather than subjecting them to critical scrutiny. This questionable combination of information and entertainment is best defined as ‘infotainment’. It involves a specific way of receiving and representing historical facts, and making them palatable to the viewer. An important aspect of infotainment is that it tries to combine emotion and knowledge, both a cognitive and an affective process. Since the American television series Holocaust, which made such an impact in 1978, personification and empathy have become central narrative strategies in representations of the Holocaust. Certainly, enlightenment is not an exclusively rational act. In 1979, when the American series was broadcast in Germany, it was extraordinarily well received, as a result of its ability to cross the barrier between public and private memory. The transmission of that widely debated series provided the opportunity to identify with the victims, while at the same time the audience was shown the entanglement of family life with political events under National Socialism. Since then private memory, which is especially located in families, has adopted emotionalized strategies of storytelling about the German past. A recent survey on ‘family memory’ (Familiengedächtnis) shows that the third generation after the Holocaust in Germany uses narrative elements from the public debates on the issue to present their grandparents in a more sympathetic light. 7 Knopp’s production fails to address this significant development, once again oversimplifying the debate. A further problem arises from Knopp’s use of voice-over, which is usually a neutral component in a documentary, providing information without trying to manipulate our emotions. In Holokaust the voice-over compels us to agree, shortcutting the processes of reflection; but it does

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this in subtle ways, using expressive intonation to imply an answer without an explicit relation to the question. The audience doesn’t get the chance to use its own mind or imagination, as it is carried along by the fluency of the production. The viewer is encouraged to consume, not to reflect. This separation between emotional and cognitive understanding is strengthened by the use of music. The effect of these elements, once again, is to sideline the more fundamental insights about political responsibility that have been promoted by recent critical debates, and to revert to the old Hitler-centred narrative. This is connected with the choice of contemporary witnesses, which fails to reflect the typical attitudes of the Nazi period, especially in its representation of ordinary people who took advantage of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Almost all of Knopp’s eyewitnesses have an ability to reflect soberly on the past and are experienced in telling their own story. In this respect, too, the choice of witnesses is not representative of present German society. The presentation of former perpetrators has a characteristic dramaturgy: first the witnesses explain their involvement in the historical events, then they reflect on their former life and express regret about what happened. By the end, we have seen only enlightened Germans. This strategy of transmitting historical understanding through the comments of eyewitnesses creates the sense of authenticity that is essential to the emotional flow of the narrative. More significantly, if the witness is a former Wehrmacht soldier, which is frequently the case, the implication is that he has learned his lesson well. This moralizing perspective strengthens the impression that former Wehrmacht soldiers are more likely to have been witnesses than perpetrators. The idea of former perpetrators as eyewitnesses is also reproduced on a visual plane, as German and Jewish persons are depicted in front of the same studio background. Transforming the Holocaust into a form of entertainment is not a new phenomenon. In 1982 Saul Friedländer wondered why the subject had become so popular, and in his essay ‘Kitsch und Tod’ (Kitsch and Death) he emphasized the psychological fascination with Nazi aesthetics. Even though a comment may be critical towards the ideology of Nazism, the aesthetics of representation can make Nazism appear perversely attractive. Friedländer’s thesis was that this fascination is due to the function of Nazi ideology, which tries to unite the incisive experience of death with harmony and stability in everyday life.8 One might have expected Knopp to take account of the implications of Friedländer’s argument. Twenty years after the publication of his warning, it seems

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unduly simplistic to present Hitler and his leadership with an aura of ominous glamour. Equally tendentious is the depiction of German suffering in Knopp’s television productions. This becomes particularly visible in one of his latest films, Die grosse Flucht (The Great Flight), which deals with the experiences of the German refugees who were driven from their homes in the eastern territories at the end of the Second World War. The series was broadcast in November 2001, one year after Holokaust, and can be seen as the logical successor. Its compelling visual narrative is reinforced by authentic eyewitness statements suggesting that Germans had to suffer like any other victims of the war. The first episode begins with historical superlatives: ‘Hitler’s war is lost (pause) though suffering continues. Millions are running away in cold and windy weather. An exodus such as the world has never seen before.’ The third episode, ‘Die Festung Breslau’ (Fortress Breslau), appropriates the language of the Death Marches endured by concentration camp victims by presenting the flight of German civilians from the approaching Russian army as ‘the death march from Breslau’ (der Todesmarsch von Breslau). At the end of the same episode, an eyewitness explains that any expulsion or resettlement is unjust, recalling how the Polish communities from the Lemberg region were resettled in Breslau after the war. The series avoids the revisionist argument that the former German territories should be reclaimed and that Polish people have no right to live there. On the contrary, it gives examples of people who accept the facts of history. But the problem that remains unresolved is how to find a language for the suffering endured by ordinary Germans at the moment of defeat. It is sometimes suggested that the sufferings of the German population after 1945 have been a taboo subject.9 This is misleading, since the current debate about that so-called taboo only becomes comprehensible when it is contextualized within the different modes of memory, distinguishing the official political debate from the informal discourse of families and civil society. While the suffering of the Germans was always articulated in family narratives, the reminiscences of war veterans and the organizations representing expellees, official political rhetoric was more restrained, since it had to bridge the gap between international political recognition and national party politics. Thus the discourse on ‘German suffering’, which—in the aftermath of Knopp’s Die Flucht—has gained a new prominence in German public debate, cannot solely be explained by the greater temporal distance from the events themselves. It marks the eruption of informal memory into the public sphere.

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In conclusion, we may consider how the new visual narrative developed by Knopp’s team at ZDF relates to the broader political spectrum. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2003, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder referred to the past in a way that signals a shift in Germany’s relation to its own history. His aim was to demonstrate that Germany is now a ‘normal’ nation, holding a position of such influence that it deserves a seat on the enlarged United Nations Security Council. He could count on considerable support for the view that the country deserves credit for its responsible attitude to its recent history and its success in ‘coming to terms with the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). However, the popular success of Knopp’s productions suggests a very different conclusion. It shows that a mythologized explanation of the Holocaust still strikes a chord with the German public, which welcomes a view of history that can hardly be described as ‘normalized’. The most serious charge to be levelled against Knopp’s mode of infotainment is that it invites more sympathy for the former perpetrators and bystanders than for the victims. This can hardly be described as a responsible approach to the pervasive criminality of the Nazi period. Notes 1 Guido Knopp (ed.), Holokaust (Munich, 2000), 20. 2 Hanno Loewy, ‘Bei Vollmond: Holokaust. Genretheoretische Bemerkungen zu einer Dokumentation des ZDF’, in 1999, vol. 2, 2002, 114–27. 3 See Institut für Sozialforschung, Gruppenexperiment. Ein Studienbericht, bearbeitet von Friedrich Pollock, mit einem Geleitwort von Franz Böhm (Frankfurt, 1955). 4 Guido Knopp (ed.), Geschichte im Fernsehen. Ein Handbuch (Darmstadt, 1988), 1, 8. All translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author. 5 See Wulf Kantsteiner, ‘Hitler according to Knopp’, available at www.UniErfurt.de/nordamerika/doc/Papers.rtf/kantsteiner.rtf (viewed 24 July 2003). 6 See Alexander and Magarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (Munich, 1998). 7 See Harald Welzer, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt, 2002). 8 See Saul Friedländer, Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Frankfurt, 1999). 9 See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter : Der Holocaust (Frankfurt, 2001).

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WHOSE BURDEN? The Significance of the Israel–Palestine Conflict in German Identity Politics Antje Schuhmann

How is the Israel–Palestine conflict negotiated in Germany? This question raises a series of issues that all lead to one fundamental topic: the politics of memory. In Germany there seems to be no way to speak about the conflict without positioning yourself within the national debate about the history of fascism and the Holocaust. Hence the main focus of this paper is not on the Israel–Palestine conflict itself, but on the way it is negotiated and functionalized in German identity politics, especially by protagonists of the former student protest movement, the ‘generation of 1968’. Whichever perspective on the conflict is adopted, whether proPalestinian or pro-Israeli, it is German history that provides the point of departure and arrival. All those who speak about ‘the Jews’, ‘the Israelis’ or ‘the Palestinians’ seem certain of at least one point: they are definitely not antisemitic, since they legitimize their respective position by distancing themselves from the Nazi past. As James Young argues, historical facts never stand for themselves, since the ways they are memorialized are always linked to the reason why we remember them. 1 This implies that commemoration may contribute to the construction of a modernized and purified national identity. My argument is framed by Benedict Anderson’s conception of nations as ‘imagined communities’, constructed around the notion of a common past and shared experiences in order to homogenize a collective. To negotiate German national identity requires that we deal with the simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity, since there is obviously no ‘unbroken’ past available to supply a sense of national belonging and identity. While some people attempt to construct a right-wing model of German patriotism, proudly including the years 1933–45, others develop their sense

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of national identity by referring far more critically to that period. This second position is highly ambiguous, representing a ‘broken’ continuity yet at the same time affirming a notion of a more ‘healthy’ and more appropriate national identity. Its ambiguity surfaces in those familiar lines of argument that start with phrases like: ‘We Germans especially must . . .’ or ‘Because we are Germans we must not . . .’. The premises underlying this stance are simultaneously correct and erroneous:

· · · · ·

They are correct in so far as political discussions should be contextualized within a specific local, historically grounded analysis. They are correct, again, since German society is still shaped by its fascist past and most of those living in the country are the offspring of perpetrators or accomplices. They are erroneous in so far as they stem from assumptions about ‘Germanness’ and ‘belonging’ that already prevailed under National Socialism. Phrases like ‘We Germans . . . because of our history . . .’ are also problematic as they reinscribe a historical closure, echoing verbally the extermination of people who were also German citizens. By excluding Germans of Jewish origin, such formulations presuppose a German national collective that is homogeneous and non-Jewish. This non-Jewish ‘we’ betrays a continuity of thinking between the fascist period and the present.

It is relevant to recall the slogan from the 1960s cited by the historian Moshe Zuckerman: ‘To endure ambivalence’. 2 But we have to face the inescapable questions:

· ·

If you are dealing with this specific past, are you automatically trapped in nationalistic rhetoric? How are you to situate yourself without continuing either the tradition of unbroken continuity or appearing to endorse the more recent concept of a modernized and ‘healed’ national continuity, precisely by stressing its discontinuities?

Revisionist positions The changing field of ‘memory politics’ influences the positions available to Germany within the international community. During the Cold War, Germany’s NATO membership and integration into the western alliance made it increasingly necessary to universalize the significance of the

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Holocaust. If Auschwitz could be transformed into a ‘normal crime’, comparable to the crimes committed by other nations, Germany could again become a ‘normal’ country and normalize its guilt. By subordinating the discourse on German fascism to an overarching conception of ‘totalitarianism’, it becomes possible to revise the notion of Germany as a ‘perpetrator nation’, and this so-called ‘Historians Dispute’ received wide public attention in the mid-1980s. Today the Holocaust is increasingly seen as a European catastrophe, with implications for the whole of humankind, serving as a kind of negative founding myth for a unified Europe: ‘Europe seems to be the embodiment of a universal programme that enables the Federal Republic of Germany to locate itself as equivalent to other nations in a reconciled community.’3 In conservative forms of Holocaust commemoration we find a universalizing tendency, making it relative and comparable with other crimes against humanity. In adopting this position, conservative thinkers aim to decrease its impact on Germany’s past and present, and thus to facilitate the development of a German national identity finally purified of this burden of guilt. By spreading the category of guilt on to other shoulders, they hope finally to close the book on German fascism, creating a basis for the development of a coherent national identity. This form of right-wing revisionism needs to be distinguished from more recent tendencies that adopt a very different strategy. Liberal and left-wing writers tend to imagine that it may be possible to construct a new model of Germanness on moral grounds by acknowledging that there will never be a narration of German history that is not shaped by National Socialism and the Holocaust. It is also possible to identify a third position, a hybrid of the other two, that transcends the conventional left– right opposition. This involves the emotionalized memory of Germans as victims, implying that their sufferings during the Second World War are comparable to those of the victims of fascism. 4 This issue has come into sharper focus through the recent debates about the obliteration bombing of German cities and the fate of German refugees driven from their homes in the former eastern provinces. There are proposals for a centre to commemorate the displacement of Germans at the end of the war, as well as the fate of victims of the Holocaust. Since unification, it has increasingly been claimed that German national identity is finally healed and legitimate, since it is now based on democratic principles and approved forms of memorializing. These nation-building processes have also required significant adjustments from former extra-parliamentary activists, who were involved in the crafting of a new ‘healed’ national identity. From a position of militant opposition to

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state institutions in the 1960s, that generation advanced so successfully through those same institutions that some of its members are now at the centres of power they formerly criticized. Consequently, formerly marginalized history has acquired an important function in today’s official politics. Sending German troops to participate in a technically illegal war in Kosovo in 1999 was legitimized by the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, with the phrase ‘Auschwitz never again’. A cynical interpretation of his message would be: ‘Since we were the ones who marched against the war in Vietnam, you can trust us now; this war is just and necessary.’ Former left-wing activists like Fischer, whose evolution from militant street fighter to government minister is well known, now use arguments that remind us of Adorno’s concept of ‘second antisemitism’.5 The analogy drawn between the situation in Kosovo and Auschwitz, as a legitimization of German military action, implies that Germans have at last been released from the position of a nation of perpetrators by transferring to the other side and joining the forces of liberation. From a more sceptical viewpoint, the invocation of the German past might also serve as an argument against the participation of military forces in a region so closely associated with the criminal actions of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Hannes Heer, curator of the first ‘Wehrmachtsaustellung’, an exhibition about the crimes committed by ordinary soldiers between 1939 and 1945, described the stance of his generation as follows: Fathers and mothers of the rebellious students gained their postwar identity by dissolving the Nazi past, excluding it from memory. Their sons and daughters grounded it in a new identity by identifying the crimes of the Nazi regime as the centre of German history, and the critique of that regime as an indispensable requirement for the development of a democratic culture in Germany. 6 Fischer’s endorsement of Germany’s civilizing mission in Kosovo marks the next stage in this process of self-legitimization. However, as a united and increasingly self-confident Germany takes a more active role in international affairs, important questions remain unresolved, not least in relation to the Israel–Palestine conflict. Solidarity with Palestine? This becomes especially clear in the activities of supporters of the Palestinian cause, who are often strengthened by references to their own earlier

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left-wing activism. It is important to stress that the ‘generation of 1968’ may be a misleading label, in so far as it has been commercialized to suggest ‘flower power’ and radical chic. The focus of this paper is on the politics of people who identify themselves as members of that generation in a more serious sense. This self-positioning appears to establish their antifascist credentials and to protect them against accusations of antisemitism when they address the politics of modern Israel. Their stance as members of the ‘generation of 1968’ supposedly positions them on the high moral ground, ignoring the tradition of leftist antisemitism associated with events like the ‘Don’t buy Israeli products!’ campaigns of the 1980s.7 A more recent example was provided by the Palestine Days that took place in Munich in November 2002 at the One World House, a citysponsored social centre in which migrant groups regularly meet and other public events take place. The topic ‘Germany and the Middle East’ attracted an audience of more than sixty people, after the event had been publicized in the local press, accompanied by the claim by the keynote speaker that ‘Israel is without a doubt racist’. The audience was informed that the general aim of the evening was to provide information that runs counter to received dominant opinion. For over fifty years, it was claimed, the German press and public had been only half informed about what was happening in the Middle East. The ‘bludgeon’ of Germany’s responsibility for Auschwitz had been used against any critic who dared to speak out against Israel. This echoed the position of Martin Walser, who claimed in his Frankfurt Peace Prize speech of 1998 that Germans were being deterred from speaking their minds by the Auschwitzkeule. But that night, at the One World House, the ‘truth’ about the Palestinian conflict would finally come to light. After two hours of enlightenment about the ‘Burden of Germany with the State of Israel’, the audience found itself discussing the analogies between Sharon and Hitler. The keynote speaker, a fifty-nine-year-old teacher, cited the human rights violations in Israel, the occupied territories and the refugee camps in order to prove that his statement about Israel’s racism was justified. He clarified his position by pointing out that because of his political biography he was very well informed about and indeed critical of the German past, and could thus launch a critique of Israel with a good conscience. He then proceeded to describe his journey towards solidarity with Palestine: I was born in 1943, which means my parents were Nazis. As a teenager I found their de-Nazification certification. I was forced to go to the cinemas and to watch those re-education movies made

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by the Allied forces, sitting next to my ex-Nazi teachers, and felt abandoned and overwhelmed. So this is the reason why I became totally pro-Israeli at that time and, shame on me, during the Six Day War I was happy about every Arab killed.8 The development of his solidarity with Palestine, presented as a story of personal liberation from early brainwashing and guilt, can be seen as an example of the more general genre of redemption narrative, leading to an implied catharsis: ‘All of us are guilty—all of us will be released from our guilt.’ This makes it possible to ‘deprive the past of its true name’ by addressing history within a framework of shame, guilt and healing, a process that has been defined as ‘Entnennung’.9 An unbearable event, we are led to believe, becomes endurable as long as something good comes out of it in the end. But James Young argues that the need to squeeze something good out of what is unbearable is not a form of reflection on the horror, but its extension. 10 This view can be contrasted with the position adopted by Joschka Fischer when he visited Israel in 2000. Borrowing the words of the Chassidic mystic Baal Shem Tov, the German foreign minister wrote in an official memory book: ‘Wanting to forget extends exile, and the secret of redemption is called memory.’ In Germany’s struggle to come to terms with its past, this quotation first gained public attention in 1988, when it was chosen as the official motto to commemorate the so-called Kristallnacht of November 1938.11 This seems an incongruous way of recalling the pogroms organized by the Nazis that occurred in nearly all German cities, when Jewish people were attacked, imprisoned and murdered, and their shops, synagogues and businesses were burned down or demolished. Is it really legitimate to cite that sentence by a Jewish scholar in the context of the German struggle to come to terms with the past? Surely, this begs the questions: What is meant by ‘exile’? Who is to find ‘redemption’ through memory? Insa Eschebach argues that the sanctification of a catastrophe helps to overcome the dualism of salvation and disaster, and is believed to lead to a kind of final conflict resolution. Citing Jacques Derrida, she claims that healing aims to re-establish a feeling of security, an undamaged self and a spotless or undefiled purity.12 On this basis, redemption through memory could be understood as Germany’s return from the exile of a fractured national consciousness. Is this the redemption that Fischer had in mind, a process that facilitates the healing of the German wound? For a long time it was assumed that the Berlin Wall, dividing the nation into two states, was the wound that symbolized Germany’s guilt. But since

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unification there has been a spate of racist and antisemitic incidents, suggesting that the national wound might not heal so easily. The shift towards an increasing self-assertiveness raises the question of whether critical self-reflection might not be preferable to final national redemption. During his campaign for a ‘normalization’ of German identity, Martin Walser described the Holocaust memorial site that is being constructed in Berlin as a nightmare the size of a soccer pitch. This kind of statement gives a popular slant to the revisionism initiated in 1986 by the historian Ernst Nolte, who deplored the German ‘past that refuses to pass away’ (Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will).13 The topos of the Germans as victims of their own past comes up again and again, with mainstream politicians like the late Jürgen Möllemann, a leading figure in the Free Democratic Party, using implicitly antisemitic arguments in their election propaganda. Antisemitism has resurfaced as a ‘perverse social game’ that now permits people to voice opinions that they would never have dared to express a decade ago.14 Returning to the theme of the Munich Palestine Days, we may ask: Who is supposed to be carrying whose burden? It seems not to be the Palestinians, suffering from the specific policies of the Israeli state. Rather, this state itself is said to be a burden—for the Germans! Reviving the tradition of questioning the right of the Israeli state to exist, the concept of the ‘Burden of Germany with the State of Israel’ exploits unacceptable references. According to the celebrated paradox, the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz, since surviving Jews symbolize the Holocaust and hence German guilt. In the image of a ‘burden’, the Israeli state and ‘the Jew’ become conflated into a unified threat for Germans seeking to reclaim their national pride. Hence the announcement of the Munich programme: ‘Trapped between the burden of guilt because of historical responsibility for the Shoah and the accusation of being antisemitic . . . Germans feel intimidated. . . . A minefield for committed human rights activists.’ One is invited to feel pity for the poor Germans, victims of their past and victims now of the state of Israel. Placing oneself in the role of victim is an easy way out, especially if the identities of perpetrator and victim are assigned to two mutually exclusive and opposing sides. Our solidarity is now with the new victims, the victims of our former victims who have now turned out to be perpetrators themselves. The Möllemann affair At the Munich Palestine Days, solidarity was also expressed with Möllemann and his illegally financed election campaign flyer. The audience,

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impressed by the piece of paper that the keynote speaker waved before their eyes, learned that this leaflet was definitely not antisemitic, as everybody in the media had been claiming. The visual design of the campaign flyer was as follows: a picture of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, was placed at the top next to a critique of his policies on Palestine. This was followed by a picture of Michael Friedmann, formerly the deputy chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In the flyer Friedmann was criticized equally vehemently for equating all anti-Israeli sentiment with antisemitism. To counter this, Möllemann was presented as a necessary taboo-breaker, bravely overcoming the typical German mental block when it comes to Israel. The aim of this paper is not to discuss whether criticism of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians is justified, but to identify the inner-political function such critiques may have in Germany. Conservatives repeatedly complain that ‘there is no space in Germany for positions critical of Israel’ and that ‘the mainstream media are biased’. This implies that critiques of Israel may acquire a democratic function by challenging the consensus. Critics of Israel can consider themselves as rebels, transgressing taboos in order to rescue the weak and vulnerable. In commenting on the sufferings of the Palestinians, they are affirming the principles of democracy by reclaiming—for the Germans—the basic rights of free speech and uncensored publication. The Munich speaker argued that Möllemann’s flyer could not be antisemitic since the harsh facts about Israeli policies towards the occupied territories had been confirmed by organizations like the United Nations. Hostility to Friedmann was attributed not to the anti-Jewish prejudices of Möllemann, but to the notion that Friedmann was personally antipathetic. But antisemitism, far from being merely personal antipathy or an echo of the distant past, is still alive among right-wing fringe groups today, in displaced forms. The Munich speaker failed to mention that Möllemann had openly supported suicide bombings and had blamed Friedmann’s provocative public statements for the increasing antisemitism in Germany. That Jews are ultimately themselves responsible for antisemitism is part of the traditional rhetoric of hate speech. Möllemann was able to reactivate this form of argument, because his views were supported by a substantial part of the German population. According to surveys conducted during 2002, an increasing number of Germans find it entirely understandable that people dislike Jews.15 This personalized and historically decontextualized form of prejudice has serious consequences. The Munich speaker, proud of his former leftwing credentials, claimed that, since he had once protected Jewish

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cemeteries, he could now afford to support Möllemann’s flyer. As a ‘certified’ non-antisemite, he felt untouched by the jungle of popular prejudice, ignoring the heritage of left-wing antisemitism. He was, after all, one of the enlightened ones, even when his discourse had nationalistic undertones, as he aligned himself and his audience with concepts like the nation-state and expressed pride in German national identity. These concepts derive from a historical period when western imperial nations colonized the rest of the world. The problem for patriotic Germans is that there is no uncontaminated language available for the expression of national pride. Key questions There is no place for anybody outside ideology. Hence the need for a critical re-evaluation of those everyday political concepts that appear so innocent. Indeed, there is a special need for critical self-reflection among those who consider themselves progressive and leftist; those who are pleased every morning, looking in the mirror, to see themselves as defiantly anti-racist and free of antisemitism. This re-evaluation of concepts should extend to the notions of emancipation that are often used so thoughtlessly, as if they were self-evident and existed in a space free of violence and power politics. The key questions to be faced would include the following:

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How are we to deal with the notion of the ‘Volk’ with its confusing blend of populist and racist associations? Should we speak of ‘the Germans’, ‘the Palestinians’ or ‘the Israelis’ in collective terms? If we question the existence of one specific state, what are the implications for the legitimacy of other nation-states? How are we to disentangle the implications of statements like ‘I am proud to be German’ and ‘Because we are Germans we must not . . .’? Are these not two sides of the same discredited coin of national identity politics? Given the difficulty of addressing the Israel–Palestine conflict without making references to German fascism and the Holocaust, how can we avoid getting trapped in nationalistic mythologies? How are we to cope with the situation after national liberation struggles have lost their innocence, which does not imply that their aims are illegitimate?

In facing these questions, we should also confront the complex relations between victims and victimizers, recognizing that there are no easily

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consumable revolutionary subjects waiting for unbroken loyalty from an innocent, well-intentioned metropolitan left. Instead of reproducing the victim/perpetrator/victim conceptual cycle, it would be more productive for emancipatory positions to resist the military, national and religious logics of all sides more resolutely. Instead of positioning ourselves in nationally defined camps, it would be more fruitful to renegotiate our positions continuously. Only an ongoing negotiation of the differences, similarities and crossovers between diverse concepts of emancipation may enable us to create new forms of political agency. Such a new conception of agency would respect the fluctuations and ambivalences of a complex process of identity formation, avoiding the hallucinations of a ‘healed’ German nation.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

James Young, At Memory’s Edge. After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London, 2000), ch. 1. Informationszentrum 3. Welt (iz3w), Zur Holocaust Rezeption und der Israel– Palästina Konflikt. Dokumentation eines Seminars mit Moshe Zuckermann (Freiburg, 2002), 18, available at www.iz3w.org (viewed 19 July 2005). All translations from the German are, unless otherwise stated, by the author. Insa Eschebach, ‘Heilig e Stätte—imaginier te Gemeinschaft. Geschlechtsspezifische Dramaturgien im Gedenken’, in Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit and Silke Wenk (eds), Gedächtnis und Geschlecht. Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen Genozids (Frankfurt, 2002), 133. For the earlier stages of this debate, see Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA, 2001). Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus’, in Kritik: Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1971), 108. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 November 2002. See Martin Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhältnisses (Frankfurt, 1990). The author, who attended the Palestine Days, took detailed notes of proceedings. Eschebach, 131. Young, ch. 1. Michael Y. Bodemann, ‘Gedenk-Kult und Gedenk-Kultur’, in Ernst Piper and Usha Swamy (eds), Gibt es wirklich eine Holocaust-Industrie? Zur Auseinandersetzung um Norman Finkelstein (Zurich, 2001), 162. Eschebach, 117. See Enzo Traverso, ‘Der neue Antikommunismus. Zu Noltes, Furets und Courtois Interpretationen des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Jungle World, 26 July 2000. See the critique by Ulrich Rauff, ‘Die Lust am bösen Wort’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 November 2003. For an overview, see Lars Langenau, ‘Antisemitismus nimmt im Westen deutlich zu’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 September 2002.

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THE AUSTRIAN TABLOID NEUE KRONEN ZEITUNG AND ITS CAMPAIGN AGAINST THOSE WHO ‘FOUL THEIR OWN NEST’ Lisa El Refaie

For an outside observer it is hard to fathom the reasons for the phenomenal success of Austria’s most popular tabloid newspaper, the Neue Kronen Zeitung (NKZ). It reaches well over 40 per cent of Austrian adults, which makes it, relative to population size, the most widely read newspaper in the world. Like other European tabloids, the NKZ regularly features pictures of topless models and offers a mixture of sensational crime reporting and polemical political commentary, while keeping to a rather conventional layout. The newspaper is also well known for the extreme partisanship it displays in relation to particular personalities and political issues. However, in spite of its influential status within Austrian society, there are remarkably few academic studies of the NKZ. This article suggests that part of the NKZ’s appeal lies in its ability to tap into and reinforce feelings of defensive nationalist pride among sections of the Austrian population that do not want to admit that there may be a darker side to the chocolate-box image of Austria propagated by the tourist industry. The NKZ capitalizes on these repressed truths by deliberately cultivating an image of itself as a symbol of resistance against anyone or anything that might tarnish the country’s reputation. It does this by staging intensive hate campaigns against anyone who dares to challenge established myths about Austria’s past or to criticize neo-Nazi tendencies in Austria. While foreign critics are accused of meddling in affairs that are of no concern to them, the greatest contempt is reserved for the ‘traitors’ from within Austria. These so-called Nestbeschmutzer (people who

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foul their own nest) are accused of besmirching Austria’s image and thus betraying their native country. Any criticism of the NKZ itself is also interpreted as an attack on its readers and, by implication, on all honest Austrians. By focussing on some of the NKZ’s campaigns to ‘defend’ Austria’s honour over the past twenty years, this paper will show how the newspaper tries to turn important social and political debates into an issue of ‘patriotic’ versus ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour. A newspaper for the masses The NKZ is the post-war reincarnation of the Kronen Zeitung, originally founded in 1900, shortly after a special tax on the distribution of daily newspapers had been abolished. This meant that, for the first time, newspapers could be produced cheaply for a less privileged readership. In fact, the Kronen Zeitung derived its name from the price of a monthly subscription to the newspaper, which was only one silver crown (Silberkrone). Apart from introducing a new smaller format to the Austrian newspaper market, the Kronen Zeitung was based on independence from any political party or other organization and on a clear emphasis on entertainment. After the Second World War and Allied occupation, the key concepts of the Kronen Zeitung were resurrected and adapted to the changed circumstances, and the word ‘new’ was added to the title. Partly due to an unwillingness on the part of politicians in the 1970s and 1980s to introduce effective anti-monopoly legislation, the daily newspaper market in Austria developed into one of the most highly concentrated of all the western industrial nations. 1 This situation continues to the present day; in 2003, for instance, the NKZ reached 43.8 per cent of the Austrian population above the age of fourteen. 2 In an interview about the key principles behind the NKZ, Hans Dichand, the co-founder and co-owner of the NKZ, admitted to having copied elements from American and British tabloid newspapers, such as the daily use of photographs of half-naked girls on a particular page and the regular opinion columns.3 Nevertheless, Dichand and his team have always been keen to stress the uniqueness of the NKZ, which, they claim, cannot really be compared to any other European newspaper. The newspaper’s long-time columnist Ernst Trost described the paper as ‘a newspaper for the masses’ that transcends all barriers of class. He also claimed that the NKZ was open to ‘critical reflection, individual world views and opinions that do not always correspond to the tastes of the general readership’.4 Although the NKZ likes to portray itself as a democratic forum for different opinions, the reality is very different. Alina Niederfrieden, who

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studied the working practices among NKZ journalists, found an extraordinary degree of enforced conformity and control, with regard both to the selection of news items and to their presentation.5 In comparison with other Austrian journalists, NKZ staff in the lower ranks are, according to Niederfrieden, mere assembly-line workers and even editors are forced to perform a clearly defined task within a highly organized system. Dichand has always been the driving force behind the paper’s success, while also keeping a tight grip on its content. For instance, the NKZ’s regular opinion columns have traditionally been firmly in the hands of a small number of elderly men, who are often Dichand’s personal friends and share his political leanings. For the past few years, however, Dichand has been engaged in an open power struggle with the German media corporation Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), which, since 1987, has owned 50 per cent of shares in the NKZ. In 2003, he tried to cement his position by replacing the NKZ’s long-serving editor-in-chief, Friedrich Dragon, with his own son, Christoph Dichand. The WAZ only agreed to this on condition that he appointed a second editor-in-chief from within the ranks of the NKZ’s established journalists and that Hans Dichand kept out of the day-to-day running of the newspaper. This led to an uneasy truce, occasionally erupting into open warfare.6 Until recently, one of the key figures among NKZ columnists was Richard Nimmerrichter, who, from 1964 until 2001, wrote regular articles for the NKZ under the pseudonym ‘Staberl’. Born in 1920, Nimmerrichter fought in the German Wehrmacht and spent some time in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, an experience he often refers to in his articles and that, according to his own testimony, gave him an enduring hatred for communism. 7 Nimmerrichter seems to have been particularly good at tapping into common prejudices and feelings of dissatisfaction and resentment among the NKZ’s readership. He liked to present himself as the voice of ‘the little man’, speaking out against a corrupt and bureaucratic system. In order to do so, he created a clear sense of ‘us’ against ‘them’. His columns generally start with a reference to a well-known recent event or piece of news, which is then used to lambaste and ridicule a particular person, standpoint or state of affairs. The highly popular Staberl columns ended when Richard Nimmerrichter fell out with Dichand in 2001. The pressure on NKZ’s editorial staff to conform to a particular line of reporting seems to be especially high when it comes to the NKZ’s notorious campaigns. For several days, sometimes even weeks, the newspaper dedicates many pages to the reporting of a particular social or political issue, generally displaying an extreme partisanship. Most commonly, these

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campaigns relate to the question of Austria’s Nazi past and the influence of contemporary right-wing movements on the country’s political life. Those who dare to challenge the newspaper’s particular brand of rightwing patriotism are subjected to highly aggressive hate campaigns. By focusing on the personality and motivations of the individual Nestbeschmutzer, any serious debate about the real issues is avoided by NKZ journalists. Perpetuating the historical myth of Austria as a ‘victim’ nation For some sections of the population, the question of Austrian responsibility for the Holocaust is still a highly sensitive issue, liable to stir up strong emotions. After the end of the Second World War, many Austrians were reluctant to admit to their initial support of the Nazi regime and tried instead to present themselves as victims of Hitler’s Germany. This section of the population eagerly seized upon the 1943 Moscow Declaration, in which the Allies described Austria as the first victim of Hitler’s aggressive expansionism. In the hope that this would encourage popular resistance to the Nazis, the Declaration also stressed that Austria could not evade responsibility for fighting on the side of Germany and that Austrians’ own contribution to their liberation would be taken into account in the final settlement.8 After the end of the war, however, the level of active resistance to the Nazis in Austria, which in any case was not very substantial, was never officially assessed. This was largely due to the fact that the Allied powers were intent on supporting the pro-western Austrian government against the Soviets: ‘The image of Austria as a victim—or potential victim—of Soviet expansion overshadowed any other, or perhaps was projected back into the Nazi era.’9 As a result, post-war Austria was subjected to less international scrutiny than Germany and it was thus comparatively easy for Austrians to avoid an honest debate about their involvement in Nazi crimes. The reluctance of some Austrians to deal with the past means that there are still quite a substantial number of people, even outside the extreme right, who welcome any apologia for Nazism, because it assuages their suppressed feelings of guilt.10 A good example of how the issue of responsibility for Nazi crimes raises hackles in Austria and mobilizes large sections of the population is provided by Elfriede Jelinek’s play Burgtheater. A Musical Farce (1982), which first established the author’s reputation as Austria’s number-one Nestbeschmutzerin. 11 The play tells the story of an Austrian family of actors who, for opportunistic reasons, collude with the Nazi regime, a clear allusion to the revered Paula Wessely and Attila Hörbiger. While writing

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Burgtheater, Jelinek gave interviews to the Austrian press, predicting that, if her play were to be performed in Vienna, it would provoke the biggest theatre scandal of the Second Republic (NZK, 31 March 1981). As it happened, Burgtheater was not premiered in Vienna but in Bonn, four years later. In spite of this, all hell broke loose in some circles in Austria, with journalists, politicians and actors joining in the condemnation of the play. The NKZ published several articles defending the reputation of Wessely and Hörbiger. The paper’s long-serving reporter Michael Jeannée described the play as a foul smear against the actor-couple and used excerpts from an interview with the famous concentration camp survivor and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal to defend the actors’ reputation (NKZ, 1 December 1985). Several other articles were dedicated to singing the praises of Wessely and Hörbiger. Under the heading ‘Vienna Knows What It Owes Its Artists’ (NKZ, 12 December 1985), an article described the reception that took place in Vienna’s city hall to celebrate the couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, and claimed that the adulation of the two actors by so many politicians and artists clearly proved the spuriousness of Jelinek’s allegations. Another example of the sensitivities surrounding Austria’s Nazi past was the presidential campaign of the former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in 1986. Several weeks into the campaign, details of his membership of Nazi organizations and of alleged crimes committed while serving as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht came to light. Waldheim, however, stubbornly refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. His defence—that he had only been ‘doing his duty’—came to symbolize the ambiguous attitude of a whole generation of Austrians to their past. Because the World Jewish Congress appeared to be behind some of the revelations about Waldheim’s past, his supporters also tried to portray him as the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy. Antisemitic prejudices, which until then had been taboo, seemed to become acceptable again at social gatherings and in public debates, and they were also expressed quite openly in the pages of the NKZ.12 The pro-Waldheim camp based its election campaign on an explicit defiance of international opinion, using the slogan ‘Now more than ever!’ (‘Jetzt erst recht!’) on many of its election posters. The NKZ threw its full weight behind this campaign; in the period between April and June 1986, the paper published 135 articles, 123 opinion columns and 86 letters to the editor, which were almost exclusively supportive of Waldheim and scathing about his detractors. 13 In the end, Waldheim was elected president of Austria with a comfortable majority, causing an international outcry.

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However, some Austrians, particularly of the second and third postwar generations, saw the affair as a chance to discuss many of the painful questions that had been covered up for so long, and the following years were generally characterized by a more honest appraisal of Austria’s Nazi past. 14 In a speech to the parliament in 1991, Chancellor Franz Vranitzky officially acknowledged for the first time that Austrian citizens were partly responsible for the suffering of millions of victims in the Second World War. In 2000/1 the Schüssel government finally agreed to two major restitution settlements for victims of the Nazis. These attempts at dismantling the myth of Austria as a ‘victim’ nation continued to be resisted by some sections of society. Some of the journalists writing for the NKZ have traditionally acted as a mouthpiece for these groups of people. In February 1992, for instance, the NKZ ran a series of articles criticizing the amendment of the law forbidding NationalSocialist activities (Wiederbetätigungsgesetz). This amendment made the denial or trivialization of crimes committed during the Nazi period illegal and finally made it possible for several well-known neo-Nazis to be convicted and sent to jail. In this commentary, ‘Methods of a Mass Murder’ (NKZ, 10 May 1992), Staberl attacked the amended law for making the denial of the gas chambers illegal. He deliberately used faulty and misleading claims, inexact numerical terms, vague expressions and allusions to antisemitic prejudices in order to justify and trivialize the crimes committed during the Holocaust. 15 Staberl’s commentary claimed that conditions in Nazi concentration camps were actually no worse than those experienced by German and Austrian soldiers in Russian prisoner-of-war camps and that most concentration camp victims were not gassed but simply died as a consequence of the harsh conditions: ‘Only a relatively small number of the Jewish victims were gassed. The others starved or were beaten to death; they died of typhus, dysentery and typhoid fever because they were denied medical treatment; they froze to death or died of exhaustion.’ The article also implied that most rich Jews were able to escape persecution and that their descendants are still using the ‘myth of martyrdom’ for their own purposes. A Jewish organization in Austria took Richard Nimmerrichter to court over the contents of this article. Although the legal court case against him ended with an acquittal for formal reasons, the article was condemned by the Press Complaints Authority for trivializing the Holocaust. Supporting Austria’s far right The NKZ is also well known for its extreme anti-foreigner stance and, particularly during the late 1980s and the 1990s, for its sympathetic portrayal

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of the overtly xenophobic Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and its contoversial leader Jörg Haider. 16 The FPÖ had grown out of the Association of Independents (Verband der Unabhängigen), which was founded in 1949 to create a ‘natural’ political home for former members of the Nazi Party. The FPÖ has always remained the preferred party of old Nazis and neo-Nazis, although the neo-liberal wing of the party was becoming more influential by the mid-1980s. Haider, who took over the party leadership in 1986, appealed to the right-wing members of the party by skilfully playing on the unresolved issue of Austria’s Nazi past. However, he managed to extend his party’s appeal well beyond such extremist circles by also stressing the importance of ‘patriotism’ and by blaming immigrants for all Austria’s social ills. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the number of asylum-seekers and immigrants suddenly increased in Austria, and Haider exploited the growing sense of insecurity and latent xenophobia in the population. In fact, as a recent comparative study shows, in the 1990s the Austrian far right dominated the debate on immigration and asylum more comprehensively than in any other European country.17 The NKZ played an important supporting role in this process, whipping up anti-foreigner sentiment and constantly defending the FPÖ against the accusation of extremism. Richard Nimmerrichter, in particular, never concealed his admiration for Jörg Haider’s boyish good looks and his cheeky polemics. In one of his columns, for instance, Staberl praises Haider’s talent for making his political opponents look ridiculous. Focusing on the physical appearance of a journalist opposing Haider in a televised debate, Staberl compares what he sees as Haider’s triumph over this journalist to the victory of the Austrian tennis player Muster over the Spaniard Bruguera: ‘In our new national hero Thomas Muster, the good-looking Sergi had encountered a superior adversary—Haider, by contrast, went through to the next round more or less without a fight’ (NKZ, 8 February 1995). Another good example of the NKZ’s vociferous support for Austria’s far right is the way the paper reacted to a series of letter-bomb and pipebomb attacks on minorities and human rights activists, which started in December 1993 and continued for almost four years. In spite of a massive security operation, the police failed to find the perpetrator of these attacks until 1997, when a lucky coincidence finally led to the arrest of Franz Fuchs, an eccentric loner and fanatical racist with no apparent political affiliations. Although Fuchs insisted that he was only a minor figure within an organization calling itself the Bajuwar Liberation Army (Bajuwarische Befreiungsarmee), he was convicted as the sole perpetrator

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of the attacks. This ruling was quite controversial in Austria because there really seemed to be some evidence pointing towards a wider network.18 Not surprisingly, the conviction of Fuchs as the sole perpetrator was used by the FPÖ to justify its original reaction to the bomb attacks, which was to deny categorically that the extreme right had any responsibility for the xenophobic climate in which they had occurred. In February 1995, for instance, when four Romanies were killed in a pipe-bomb attack, many supporters of the FPÖ reacted by talking of a left-wing conspiracy to discredit their movement and by initiating smear campaigns against the party’s critics. 19 Many of the NKZ journalists implicitly or explicitly supported this strategy. After the murder of the Romanies, several articles and commentaries in the NKZ stressed the fact that the terrorists were just as likely to be from the extreme left as from the extreme right of the political spectrum. Under the headline, ‘After the Bomb Attacks: All Extremists Are under Suspicion’ (NKZ, 9 February 1995), one news report reminded readers that left-wing extremists had a long tradition of using terrorist bomb attacks to get their message across. The NKZ’s in-house ‘poet’ Wolf Martin dedicated three of its daily doggerel rhymes to the question of who was responsible for the attacks. In one rhymed verse, he implied that the Austrian public broadcasting corporation was dominated by the left and was therefore bound to blame Jörg Haider (NKZ, 8 February 1995). In another (NKZ, 24 February 1995), he suggested that the New Right simply represented a protest movement of the young against the socialist establishment and that in this respect it was no different to the left-wing protest movement of the 1960s against the then conservative government. Finally, Wolf Martin used one of his rhymes to ridicule those who in the past had accused the police and security services of human rights abuses and who were now criticizing the police for failing to catch the perpetrators of the racist attacks (NKZ, 11 February 1995). As always, it was Staberl who voiced the most extreme views, arguing that there were no ‘logical’ motivations for this attack at all, given that the Romanies had already achieved official recognition as an Austrian ethnic minority (NKZ, 9 February 1995). He also pointed out that they had ‘never shown any political ambitions’ and were ‘completely unimportant in numerical terms’. In his opinion, the perpetrators were more likely to be criminal psychopaths, who would only be encouraged by all the attention they were now receiving. In another commentary, Staberl suggested that all those people who were now holding vigils for the victims and demonstrating against racism were being misused by the social democratic

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government as a weapon against their political opponents: ‘While the invisible people behind the operation pull the strings, the manipulated demonstrators provide a fine photo opportunity as they march past the strategically placed cameras’ (NKZ, 13 February 1995). Staberl even went so far as to compare the tendency to blame the extreme right for all social ills to the scapegoating of the Jews by the Nazis: Now it’s the ‘right-wing extremists’ who are to be blamed for everything. . . . One simply can’t help but draw the parallel with the incorrigible antisemites. In very many cases, they haven’t seen a Jew for many years, but they nevertheless continue to cling to the convenient phrase: ‘The Jews are to blame!’ Who among us can claim to know any ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘neo-Nazis’? Nowadays, there are only small traces of these groups in the population of our country (NKZ, 18 March 1995). In another commentary, which referred to the recent vandalising of some paintings by the Austrian avant-garde painter Arnulf Rainer, Staberl reiterated this line of argument. He ridiculed those who were suggesting that the unknown perpetrators of this act of vandalism were likely to be rightwing activists by pointing out that a recent bomb attack on an electricity pylon had also initially been blamed on the extreme right: ‘How embarrassing that the terrorists unfortunately blew themselves up, thereby unwillingly revealing their identity as left-wing fanatics’ (NKZ, 28 April 1995). However, Staberl’s greatest contempt was reserved for the Nestbeschmutzer, such as the controversial German director of Vienna’s Court Theatre, Claus Peymann. When Peymann ventured to criticize the incompetence and racism of the police and the hypocritical behaviour of certain politicians at the funeral of the four Romanies, Staberl castigated the ‘Prussian wrecker of the Vienna Court Theatre’ for making such outrageous comments and for interfering yet again in affairs that were ‘none of his damn business’ (NKZ, 18 February 1995 and 16 February 1995). In another commentary, Staberl sarcastically remarked that Peymann and some of his artistic colleagues had been prophesying the bomb attacks in their ‘artistic offerings’ for a long time. He suggested they take over the police investigations, instead of accusing the executive of right-wing sympathies: Perhaps the clown of the Court Theatre, Peymann, in league with his comrades in arms Jelinek and Heller, should at last be given

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responsibility for the police investigation. Anyone who has such prophetic abilities really ought to be able to catch the bombers in no time at all (NKZ, 15 February 1995). In spite of its consistent support for Jörg Haider and the extreme right in Austria, the NKZ chose to oppose the participation of the FPÖ in a coalition government with Austria’s conservatives after the 1999 elections, in which the FPÖ gained almost 27 per cent of the votes. This unexpected withdrawal of support can probably be explained by the newspaper’s heavy dependence on Hans Dichand’s fickle political allegiances, which cannot always be predicted. However, when the new right-wing government was faced with huge weekly demonstrations, intense international criticism and the threat of sanctions imposed by the European Union, the NKZ reverted to its usual strategy of defending Austria’s reputation by viciously attacking the critics at home and abroad.20 When it comes to defending its own reputation, the reaction of the NKZ is more predictable: whoever dares to voice even the slightest criticism is bound to attract the collective wrath of the journalists writing for this newspaper. Acting in self-defence? The NKZ likes to portray itself as being under constant attack from political opponents and people jealous of its success or enraged by its irreverent line of reporting. As the columnist of the NKZ Ernst Trost once claimed, the incredible success of his newspaper inevitably led to conflicts, envy and greed, and made it an obvious challenge to ‘all the powerful people in this country and to those who want to become powerful’. 21 In fact, the NKZ appears to cultivate the myth of being under constant attack quite deliberately. According to the media analyst Peter Bruck, this strategy allows the newspaper to deny its actual position of political and economic power and to present itself instead as a symbol of resistance by the common people against the cultural and political elite.22 Many of the NKZ’s campaigns thus seem to follow the same simple story line: evil critics, motivated by envy, invent false accusations against the newspaper, which refuses to be cowed and proceeds to defeat its enemies. The sense of being slandered and victimized is then projected on to the imagined community of NKZ readers, so that every criticism of the paper is interpreted as an attack on all ‘right-thinking’ Austrians. Since people are afraid of becoming the target of one of the newspaper’s hate campaigns, most prominent Austrians are careful not to

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voice any open criticism of the NKZ. One exception is the author Elfriede Jelinek. Apart from being one of the most outspoken critics of the far right in Austria, she is also one of the few public figures who dares to attack the NKZ, often in a highly provocative way. Consequently, she has become a favourite hate figure for NKZ journalists and they regularly write about her, even though her work, which is notoriously difficult and erudite, would normally not be of any interest to this tabloid paper’s general readership. However, the NKZ never engages with the essence of Jelinek’s polemic against the dumbing-down effects of tabloid journalism. Instead, the NKZ tries instead to tarnish her reputation by attacking her at a personal level and presenting her as pathetic and ridiculous. A revealing example of this occurred in the spring of 2002, when Jelinek wrote an essay in which she criticized NKZ readers and sarcastically referred to Hans Dichand as the ‘Lord God’ of Austrian public life. This remarkably outspoken essay, first published on 9 March 2002 in the liberal German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung, attacked the NKZ from a variety of angles, denouncing its domination of the Austrian newspaper market and its reduction of public events to the ‘terrifyingly nourishing mush of tabloid format’. In her view, this insidious style of journalism becomes a substitute for democratic debate: The masses read the Kronen Zeitung, that is, they hear themselves think, without suspecting that they are only being given what they have in any case always thought; on the contrary, they are delighted that there are people who say what they have always said themselves, only in a better, faster, blacker manner; and in this way the thought process is cut short before it can even begin. . . . No, I don’t wish to demonize Dichand. He is already a demon. And the whole point is to make it clear that this demon is a perfectly ordinary old man . . . ; he doesn’t have to be anything else, because, as I said, for the Austrian public he is nothing less than God himself. 23 Hans Dichand described Jelinek‘s satire as ‘grotesque’ and reproved her for discussing God in this disrespectful manner (Die Presse, 2 April 2002). In the pages of the NKZ these relatively restrained comments by Dichand himself were backed up by a more aggressive attack against the author by the maverick campaigner for Green issues and regular contributor to the paper, Günther Nenning. He quoted sections of Jelinek’s article out of context in order to prove that she had finally gone completely mad:

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One could say that your view of Hans Dichand as God is just a play on words, just satire. But your hatred is too profound for that, and the links to your very own private despair go too deep. No, you are being serious. . . . Hidden behind your hatred of Dichand is there, perhaps, an unrequited, frustrated love, and what kind of love might it be? I am saddened by your desperation (NKZ, 10 March 2002). The columnist uses the second-person singular to simulate a personal address and he interprets Jelinek’s criticism of Hans Dichand as an expression of her alleged mental illness. This example demonstrates how the NKZ avoids confronting Jelinek on the level of her arguments; instead, it presents her as a hysterical and deranged woman whose opinions can be completely disregarded. This exchange confirms the gulf between Jelinek’s thought-provoking hyperboles and the prejudices of Austrian popular culture. For years the NKZ has been denigrating her work, not only as a social critic but also as a dramatist and novelist. In October 2004 the news that Jelinek had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature left the paper almost speechless. Conclusion At first glance, the Neue Kronen Zeitung is a rather conventional tabloid newspaper with an uninspiring layout and repetitive daily columns by mostly elderly male journalists. Nevertheless, for many decades the NKZ has reached over 40 per cent of Austrian newspaper readers and it played an influential role within Austrian society. The issues explored above suggest that the appeal of the NKZ is due to a large extent to its ability to tap into and reinforce in its readers feelings of resentment against anyone who questions established myths about the country’s history or about Austrians’ attitude towards foreigners. It is in this context that the socalled Nestbeschmutzer fulfil such an important role for the NKZ and its readership. Instead of dealing with the moral questions raised by these critical observers of Austrian society, the NKZ launches personal attacks against them, questioning their integrity and even their sanity. Not surprisingly, faced with the threat of becoming the target of one of the paper’s vicious campaigns, many people are afraid of openly voicing opposition to this tabloid newspaper and to its main political tenets. For this reason, the NKZ has had not only a strong influence on political opinion in Austria over the past few decades but also a detrimental effect on the whole culture of public debate.

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Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18

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Richard Hummel, ‘Einfalt statt Vielfalt: Pressesituation und -politik der 70er und 80er Jahre in Österreich’, in Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, Fritz Hausjell and Peter Pelinka (eds), Zeitungs-Los: Essays zu Pressepolitik und -konzentration in Österreich (Salzburg, 1992), 43–54. ‘Jahresbericht 2003’, available at the Media Analyse website, www.mediaanalyse.at/frmdata2003.html (viewed 31 April 2004). Gregory Malcolm, ‘Am Busen des Erfolges: Hans Dichand. Ein Interview’, in Peter A. Bruck (ed.), Das österreichische Format: Kulturkritische Beiträge zur Analyse des Medienerfolges ‘Neue Kronen Zeitung’ (Vienna, 1991), 162–8. Ernst Trost, ‘Geleitwort’, in Hans Dichand, Kronen Zeitung: Die Geschichte eines Erfolges (Vienna, 1977), 9–10 (9). All translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author. Alina Niederfrieden, ‘Der Journalist im Kommerz: Arbeit und Alltag in der Neuen Kronen Zeitung’, in Bruck (ed.), 24–33. See, for instance, ‘Für Dichand stehen “Zeichen auf Krieg”’, Der Standard, 5 July 2003. Dichand, 224. Peter Pelinka and Armin Thurnher, Österreich neu: Der Report an den Kanzler : 12 Provokationen zu Themen der Zeit (Vienna, 1994), 48 ff. Robert Knight, ‘Contours of memory in post-Nazi Austria’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 34, no. 4, 2000, 5–11 (7). Brigitte Bailer-Galander and Wolfgang Neugebauer, Incorrigibly Right: Rightwing Extremism, ‘Revisionists’ and Anti-Semites in Austrian Politics Today (Vienna and New York, 1996), 33. Pia Janke (ed.), Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek & Österreich (Salzburg and Vienna, 2002), 171–82; see also Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, ‘In the eyes of the press: provocation—production—prominence. A critical documentation of Elfriede Jelinek’s reception’, in Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (eds), Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language (Riverside, CA, 1994), 287–302 (292 ff.). Ruth Wodak et al., ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter’. Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus (Frankfurt, 1990), 121–64. Holger Rust, ‘Journalisten im Wahlkampf: Die bemerkenswerte Konsonanz von Berichterstattung und Kommentaren in der Neuen Kronen Zeitung’, in Bruck (ed.), 128–43. Felix De Mendelssohn, ‘The return of the repressed: is Austria a racist society?’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 34, no. 4, 2000, 13–22. Helmut Gruber and Ruth Wodak, ‘Ein Fall für den Volksanwalt? Diskursanalyse der Kronenzeitungsberichterstattung zu Neonazismus und Novellierung des österreichischen Verbotsgesetzes im Frühjahr 1992’, Wiener Linguistische Gazette, supplement 11, 198b, 1992. Nimmerrichter’s tendentious article is reproduced in facsimile in Janke (ed.), 104. Richard Mitten, ‘Austria all black and blue: Jörg Haider, the European sanctions, and the political crisis in Austria’, in Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka (eds), The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2002), 179–212 (197). Ruth Wodak and Teun A. van Dijk (eds), Racism at the Top: Parliamentary Discourses on Ethnic Issues in Six European States (Klagenfurt, 2000). Hans C. Scheid, Franz Fuchs—Doch kein Einzeltäter? (Graz and Vienna, 2001).

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19 Wolfgang Purtscheller, Markus Kemmerling and Vaclav Kopecky (eds), Delikt: Antifaschismus. Briefbombenterror in Österreich und Kriminalisierungskampagnen von Rechts (Berlin, 1998). 20 Rosemarie Schwaiger, ‘Zirkus Krone’, Profil, 29 January 2001, 44–7 (46). 21 Trost, 9. 22 Peter A. Bruck, ‘Das österreichische Format: Eine Einleitung’, in Bruck (ed.), 7–23. 23 This article and the following two are reprinted in Janke (ed.), 107–11.

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MODERN RUSSIAN NATIONALISM ON TELEVISION AND RADIO AS A REFLECTION OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE Sergei Zassorin

Nationalist discourses in post-Soviet Russia The widespread perception that classical communism and western-style liberalism have exhausted their potential in Russia has resulted in a gradual but significant swing towards the ideology of nationalism. In a decade, popular opinion has shifted considerably in favour of traditional Russian and imperial values. The disintegration of the USSR, and the difficulties subsequently faced by 25 million Russians in former Soviet Union (FSU) countries, has led to an intense search for national self-identification. The loss of ‘great power’ status has revived nineteenth-century ‘national idea’ disputes, and nostalgia has grown for such notions as ‘the mighty USSR’ or ‘the powerful Russian empire’ (almost identical in the minds of some politicians). Frustration at inefficient market reforms, an uncivilized public power struggle and a growing distrust of government has undermined the public’s positive image of liberal democracy and left Russians vulnerable to ethnic prejudices and the notorious ‘Zionist-Masonic’ conspiracy theories. In addition, two Chechen wars, combined with the popular myth that people from the Caucasus dominate the Russian mafia, have resulted in the creation of an image of an ‘internal enemy’. Russian ethno-nationalists currently face a choice between aggressive hegemonic chauvinism and a comparatively tolerant civic patriotism. For the Russian radical right, the political solution lies in totalitarian statism. Its programmes stress the protectionist function of the state in the form of legally guaranteed privileges for the Russian majority, ethnically

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proportional representation in all government bodies and public offices, and the restoration of an imperial unitary state with its traditional, prerevolutionary administrative units. It is not only among ultra-nationalists that this dilemma is hotly debated; the ‘civic-territorial federation’ as an alternative to the ‘ethnic state’ is also being sharply criticized in mainstream Russian academic and political circles. 1 The ultra-nationalist preference for ethnic hegemony is manifested in various ways. The Russian Party, for instance, advocates Russian expansion into northern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the Crimea and left-bank Ukraine, and a redrawing of the boundaries to reflect the settlement areas of ethnic Russians. It demands that only an ethnic Russian be elected as head of state, that ‘Zionist property’ be returned to the ‘robbed Russian people’, and that Jews be expelled from Russia. The National Republican Party of Russia (Natsional’no-respublikanskaia partiia Rossii) suggests an ethnically proportional electoral system and a so-called ‘geographical federation’ composed of territorial units that provide cultural or economic autonomy for non-Russian ethnic groups, on the strict condition that they accept the predominant ‘historical Russian statehood’. This reconstruction is to be accompanied by the ‘peaceful repatriation’ of ethnic Russians from the FSU republics. Perhaps the most ridiculous party platform is that of Russian National Unity (Russkoe natsional’noe edinstvo, RNE), which extends the definition of ‘ethnic Russian’ to include Ukrainians and Belarusians, and argues for the ‘genetic cleansing’ of the ‘Russian race’, including a prohibition on mixed marriages and priority for ethnic Russians in healthcare services.2 Moderate civic nationalism has been appropriated by Russian centrist political groups that are now predominantly associated with the United Russia (Edinaia Rossiia) party and various smaller parties in the same segment of the political spectrum, such as the newly established People’s Party (Narodnaia partiia), the Party of Russian Revival (Partiia Rossiiskogo vozrozhdeniia, founded by Gennadii Selezniev, the former chairman of the State Duma), and the Party of Life (Partiia zhizni, founded by Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Council of Federation). United Russia is in effect the pro-presidential ‘ruling party’, with a solid parliamentary majority after the 2003 national elections, and its patriotism is being increasingly engaged by Putin’s new political course. The post-Soviet mass media The concerted efforts of nationalist groups to appeal to public opinion via the mass media are a significant facet of the ideological competition

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in post-Soviet Russia, and this paper will focus primarily on the media of television and radio. This focus reflects recent trends in the development of the national mass media: during the post-Soviet transition period, the ‘nation of readers’ turned into a ‘nation of viewers’. As the result of price liberalization in the early 1990s, the majority of Russian families radically reduced their expenditure on published periodicals, as subscriptions to newspapers and journals in particular became prohibitively expensive for average wage-earners. The key position previously occupied by the print media in Russian communications is now occupied by television, which ‘has turned into the leading source of international, national, and even regional and local information’.3 About 40 per cent of Russians watch national television news daily while not more than 20 per cent of them read national newspapers, and the level of public trust is also significantly in favour of television: 36 per cent trust television in comparison to the 13 per cent who trust the print media.4 Furthermore: the volume of daily newspapers in contemporary Russia per one thousand citizens is 6 times less than in Japan, 2.5 times less than in Britain and 1.5 times less than in France. Around 30 per cent of adult Russians do not read newspapers at all.5 The marked contrast to the standards and practices of the Soviet era is further indicated by comparative international sociological research conducted in 1997 in Russia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the United States. According to polls, Russia had the highest percentage of citizens who watched television frequently (58 per cent) and the lowest percentage of frequent readers (31 per cent).6 Another recent media phenomenon is the significantly increased impact of Russian radio. Eighty-two per cent of Russians regularly listen to various radio stations,7 again, a much higher percentage than those who regularly read newspapers. The new radio fares even better with public opinion than post-Soviet television: 76.9 per cent of Russians declare themselves currently satisfied with radio broadcasting, compared to the 65 per cent satisfied by television.8 Sociologist Boris Dubin argues that Russian television is currently playing a rather conservative role in public education: ‘television is reviving nostalgia among its viewers. It is reinforcing the ideas and images of Soviet times, the symbols of a superpower and the supremacy of the “Russian way”.’9 The widespread myth that American movies dominate Russian

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television is not borne out by statistical data. In 1999, for example, Russian national channels aired 3,464 American films and 4,788 Russian ones, 4,011 of which were Soviet films.10 Interestingly, in 2000 the number of Soviet films shown on television was declared insufficient by 23 per cent of respondents to an All-Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM) poll. A similar number of those interviewed demanded that television propagate ‘inspiring examples from Russian heroic history’, 11 and increase the number of programmes about Russian culture and traditions. Nationalists on television: Dugin and Zhirinovskii One of the earliest radical nationalists to take advantage of the increased popularity of television and radio was Aleksandr Dugin, a political philosopher and the co-founder of the ‘conser vative-revolutionary’ National-Bolshevik Party (Natsional-bol’shevistskaia partiia), who has recently gained a degree of respectability by becoming advisor to the Chairman of the Duma and leader of the ‘Eurasia’ movement, which he founded in 2001. Arguably, Dugin’s political success is due in part to his manipulation of the media, and in part to the adoption of neo-eurasianism as a theoretical base for the Putin administration’s foreign policy.12 During the 1990s Dugin established his own publishing house to distribute a series of books and several magazines. He has also on occasion gained access to a much wider audience through television and radio.13 In September 1993, for example, Dugin’s television series Mysteries of the Century (Tainy veka) promoted ‘intellectual and mystical fascism’ in a series of lectures on topics such as Nazi and fascist symbolism on the first and main television channel ORT. Mysteries, made in collaboration with Iurii Vorob’evskii, was also repeated on the new fourth television channel (before the advent of NTV).14 As Stephen Shenfield observes, in 1997 Dugin also had a weekly hour-long radio programme, with a cult following among university students, called Finis Mundi (End of the World), broadcast on the popular music station FM 101. Finis Mundi was suspended after sixteen weeks, but Dugin later established a second programme on Free Russia, a less well-known radio station.15 Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the notorious leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LPDR), has proved a favourite television personality on all channels with his endless interviews and quotable remarks. His image as an independent and fearless nationalist oppositionist has vanished since his relative success in the parliamentary elections of 1993, and now he is perceived by many Russians as a blatant populist and corrupt opportun-

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ist. Television producers nevertheless exploit what remains of his former popularity by engaging Zhirinovskii as a showman, actor and even singer. In his turn, Zhirinovskii uses any opportunity to revive his image as a charismatic leader. In addition to his regular participation in televised political debates, he has sponsored and broadcast a television profile of himself entitled ‘This Is Zhirinovskii’, and for some months ran a serial ‘instructive show’, The Zhirinovskii School. More than that, he has been recently utilizing his ‘artistic gifts’, playing Mozart in a television version of Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri, singing in various televised concerts and recording popular songs that have been broadcast on the radio. Such broad and artificial interest in Zhirinovskii from the mass media could partly explain his relative success in the 2003 State Duma election, which could hardly have been predicted beforehand: his party took third place with 11.45 per cent, close behind the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which polled 12.61 per cent, though of course trailing behind the pro-Putin United Russia party with its 37.57 per cent of the vote. Since 1993 the LDPR’s electoral results had been steadily declining, and in the 1999 elections the party barely overcame the 5 per cent barrier. Now Zhirinovskii’s party has managed to more than double its share of the vote, using the populist and provocative new slogan ‘We stand for the Russians, we stand for the poor!’ Together, the LDPR and Motherland (Rodina)—two overtly nationalist parties—attracted more than 20 per cent of the total vote. Such a result, together with the success of the moderately nationalist United Russia party, ‘could lead to some serious changes in the public climate and profoundly affect Russian foreign policy, especially relations with Former Soviet Union countries’.16 Some experts believe that the 2003 elections have proved ‘the growth of binary geopolitical thinking among the Russian public: a political opposition to the outside world, which is understood as indifferent or hostile to Russia’.17 Nationalists on television: the Russian House programme From 1992 to 2004 the third channel of Russian television hosted the weekly Sunday programme Russian House (Russkii dom), produced by Aleksandr Krutov and broadcast by the Moscow regional television station Moskoviia. Russian House represented a hybrid of ethnic Russian hegemony and Orthodox exclusiveness, as indicated by the programme’s logos: the national religious symbols of an icon of Sergii of Radonezh and Russian church domes, superimposed with an Orthodox cross. Krutov (also the programme’s presenter) combined radical anti-liberalism with anti-communism, habitually describing the 1917 October revolution and

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subsequent civil war as the ‘criminal destruction of the Russian state’ and the ‘merciless ruin of the Russian national spirit’. This is still more striking if one bears in mind that fifteen years ago, during the culminating phase of Gorbachev’s reforms, Krutov was a steadfast advocate of ‘socialist renovation’ and launched a completely pro-government and unashamedly ‘official’ programme called Perestroika Searchlight (Prozhektor perestroiki). Another example of this sort of ideological caprice is the role played by Nikolai Leonov in the programme. Russian House regularly engaged Leonov, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, as a political commentator and ‘expert’ on world affairs. Before his academic (and television) career, Leonov was a personal interpreter for Fidel Castro and a senior KGB official, heading a department of the external intelligence service. During its twelve years on air, Russian House concentrated as a rule on standard Russian Orthodox topics, although it also included interviews with radical conservative elements within the Russian Orthodox Church. Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) of the powerful Sretenskii monastery, for example, a leading voice in fundamentalist church circles, sat on the editorial board of the programme and frequently appeared on screen. Russian House also featured virulently antisemitic material: several shows broadcast in 1999 denied the Holocaust, accused Jews of being part of a conspiracy to take over the world and focused on what Krutov called the ‘ancient cabalistic murder’ of Tsar Nicholas II. The show thus earned a reputation as a forum through which extremist groups could spread their ideas. Nevertheless, in 2002, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksii II wrote a glowing letter of congratulation on the tenth anniversary of the show, stating that Russian House ‘has earned its reputation as a fighter against any sort of untruth and a champion of the high ideals of Holy Russia’.18 On the eve of the 2003 Russian parliamentary and 2004 presidential elections, political comments made on Russian House revealed an interesting new tendency. Without any cessation of their constant and radical criticism of the entire ‘cosmopolitan and Russophobic Russian government’, Krutov and Leonov began to distinguish Putin from his surrounding political environment. They singled Putin out for praise for his plans to restore a mighty Russian army, his attempts during his visit to the United States in September 2003 to reconcile the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and other ‘patriotic’ acts. Such tactical manoeuvres by

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Russian House and its political allies—most significantly the State Duma deputy Sergei Glaz’ev, a former minister in the Russian government, a major leader of the Congress of Russian Communities movement and one of the creators of the new nationalist electoral bloc Motherland— are no doubt calculated to demonstrate to Putin that he can rely on nationalist groups for support if he continues his shift towards Russian nationalism. Russian House also contributed to the astonishing electoral success of Motherland in the 2003 State Duma elections by offering a platform to Sergei Glaz’ev and other leaders of the newborn bloc. This new political coalition was created by Dmitrii Rogozin, the former chairman of the State Duma’s International Committee, and won fourth place with 9.02 per cent, polling 5.5 million votes. The coalition was intended as ‘a labour party with a national spirit’. Composed of three separate parties—People’s Will (Narodnaia volia), the Socialist United Party of Russia (Sotsialisticheskaia edinaia partiia Rossii) and the Party of the Russian Regions (Partiia rossiiskikh regionov)—Motherland’s professed programme ‘created a hybrid of Russian nationalism and socialist populism’. 19 Igor’ Kliamkin, a prominent commentator on contemporary Russian political culture, argues that at the time of the election Motherland ‘. . . answered a popular public demand for an anti-oligarch, redistributive [political] orientation, but it expressed the idea in a much brighter and more attractive form than the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) had previously’. 20 This populist stance was again in evidence during the 1 May 2004 celebrations, when the slogan ‘Russia without Oligarchs’ was on display at a major Motherland meeting in Moscow. During the presidential election in March 2004 Motherland suffered a serious split, when one part of the coalition and parliamentary faction, headed by Dmitrii Rogozin, supported Vladimir Putin, and the other part backed Motherland’s Sergei Glaz’ev, who was standing as an opposition candidate. Simultaneously, Rogozin started to transform the electoral bloc Motherland into a political party of the same name. In an interview with one of Russia’s leading newspapers, Rogozin confessed that the newborn party ‘significantly depends on governmental mass media, especially television, controlled by the presidential administration’.21 In this context it is hardly surprising that the Motherland party leadership chose to substitute Mikhail Markelov, presenter of the moderate nationalist television programme Our Version: Confidentially (Nasha versiia: Pod grifom sekretno), for Viktor Gerashchenko (a former Russian State Bank chairman, now the head of YUKOS) in the Motherland parliamentary faction.

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The connections between Russian House and Motherland are more than a matter of the former’s supportive coverage, however. Krutov and Leonov were both included in the Motherland party list and joined the Russian parliament with significant administrative positions: Krutov became a deputy head of the State Duma committee on information policy, and Leonov became a member of the Duma committee on security. These political gains were paid for, however, by the loss of Russian House, and on 12 October 2003 the programme was taken off the air by Moskoviia. The official reason given for this decision was that its hosts, Krutov and Leonov, were running for office and, if they remained on air, they would be in danger of violating the law against pre-election propaganda in the news media. A statement from the programme’s editors announced that Russian House was to go off the air temporarily, until after the 7 December 2003 election, but subsequently Moskoviia replaced it with another, similar show (Russian Outlook, see below) in the same time-slot, indicating that Russian House was unlikely to return. The last broadcast of Russian House was made on 25 January 2004, and—true to form—it included interviews with Patriarch Aleksii II and Dmitrii Rogozin. Krutov and his colleagues reacted to the permanent removal of the programme with a predictable mixture of complaints and conspiracy theories. However, during this conflict it was made public that Krutov had been engaged in a series of disputes with the station’s management over several years, but particularly since the election of a new governor in Moscow Oblast, Boris Gromov, whose administration is part-owner of the station. Krutov was general director of Moskoviia from 1997 to 2001 and, during this period, was backed by the former governor Tiazhlov, who was trying to build up a popular image of himself as a ‘patriotic regional ruler’. However, under the leadership of Gromov, known for his centrist and pragmatic attitudes, the Moscow Oblast Ministry of Information stripped Krutov of his position and manoeuvred new shareholders on to the Moskoviia board. These manoeuvres were reportedly connected with Mikhail Men’, son of the late Father Aleksandr Men’ (formerly the unofficial leader of the liberal wing of the Russian Orthodox Church), at that time an assistant to Governor Gromov. Predictably, the ‘patriotic’ press reacted sharply to the move against Krutov, and politicians joined the fray. The leaders of the Communist Party (Gennadii Ziuganov) and the Agrarian Party (Nikolai Kharitonov, a Communist candidate in the 2004 presidential election), together with the editors of Tomorrow (Zavtra) and Soviet Russia (Sovetskaia Rossiia)—two major nationalist newspapers—wrote an open letter signed by the National-Patriotic

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Union of Russia, protesting at the firing of Krutov. The letter called upon the federal government to come to Krutov’s defence because ‘he represented the interests of the Russian people’.22 Nationalists and antisemites on television: outside the Russian House Russian Outlook (Russkii vzgliad)—in comparison to Russian House—appears to be less politicized and aggressive. Its criticism mostly focuses on the social and economic problems faced by those living in the Russian provinces, the violation of the Russian diaspora’s cultural rights in FSU countries and so on. It deals regularly and seriously with traditional Russian Orthodox issues, but has avoided (so far) any indication of religious exclusiveness and ethnic chauvinism. The show is therefore broadly speaking in solidarity with the ideological line of the Putin government. In a broadcast of 2 May 2004, for example, Russian Outlook demonstrated selective pan-Slavic convictions in describing the Crimean conflict in an anti-Ukrainian manner, and expressing pro-Serbian solidarity in the context of the Kosovo crisis. Furthermore, the famous television journalist Ivan Demidov, still popular among young people for his musical shows, is the main presenter of Russian Outlook. The attractive image of Russian Outlook as a moderate, ‘patriotic’ programme is reinforced by frequent public discussions of the phenomenon of the ‘Russian outlook’ (or ‘ethnic Russian mentality’), in which numerous celebrated writers, actors, musicians and other public figures take part. In terms of the second variety of Russian nationalism, a moderate and comparatively civic form of nationalism is reflected on Russian television in the weekly hour-long programme Postscriptum broadcast on TVTs, which is controlled by Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov. Aleksei Pushkov, the creator, director and presenter of Postscriptum, clearly reflects the policy of Russian economic protectionism, claims a leading role for Russia in Eurasian geopolitics and supports Russian diaspora interests in the FSU countries—all of which are typical of Luzhkov’s restricted nationalism. A similar ‘patriotic’ position is typical of the above-mentioned programme Our Version: Confidentially by Mikhail Markelov, and the rather traditional television show Moment of Truth (Moment istini), presented by Andrei Karaulov, also broadcast on TVTs. While TVTs, under Mayor Luzhkov’s management, now appears to be moving in a more centrist direction, the Russian House television programme is not the only propagator of antisemitic sentiment to have been broadcast by Moskoviia. On 28 July 2002, a highly antisemitic

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programme called Anti-disinformation (Antideza), written and produced by Aleksandr Zhilin, was also broadcast. Zhilin, together with two ‘experts’— the lawyer G. Khokhriakov and K. Petrov, chairman of the Unification Party (Edinenie)—argued that ‘antisemitism was in the past and is at the present moment engendered by Jews themselves, that Jewish capital provoked the October revolution in Russia, politically created Hitler and established a new “Third Reich” in the state of Israel’. 23 They also came to the conclusion that ‘the phenomenon of antisemitism is constantly reproduced and organized by some inter-state Jewish mafia’. 24 After a special consideration of this broadcast, the grand jury of the Russian Journalists’ Union accused the creators of Anti-disinformation of ‘defending the wholly one-sided approach to antisemitism based on the so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a recognized tool to incite ethnic intolerance and discord’.25 Time (Vremia), the daily information programme on ORT—Russian Public Television (Obshchestvennoe Rossiiskoe televidenie), the first and most widely distributed television channel—includes a regular supplement called However (Odnako). However fluctuates between moderate Russian nationalism and the expression of anti-western and anti-Caucasian fears. Despite numerous protests from liberal circles and the Chechen diaspora in Moscow, Mikhail Leont’ev (the programme’s creator, director and presenter) has failed to curb his aggressive language and, more significantly, has recently joined the United Russia party. In his programme Leont’ev occasionally gives the floor to another popular nationalist journalist and politician, Aleksandr Nevzorov, once widely known for his critical television programme 600 Seconds. The impact of this broadcast is likely to be significant, given that ORT is the most popular Russian television channel according to the above-mentioned VTsIOM poll conducted in 2000: 79 per cent of respondents preferred ORT to other channels,26 and ORT is watched by 98 per cent of Russian citizens.27

Russian House on the radio and in print While it was still being broadcast on television, Russian House was also available at times in a radio version on the People’s Radio station. Currently, this radio broadcast is the only substitute for the prohibited television show, and the Russian House radio programme is broadcast twice a week on People’s Radio. This station has been broadcasting for six years, and includes in its crowded daily schedule programmes such as People’s Control, Orthodox Community, The City and the World and My Moscow (the titles of the latter two broadcasts are explained by the regional nature of the

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station, although there are ambitious plans afoot to gain access to Russiawide airwaves). People’s Radio specifically targets young people, the disabled and other marginalized or vulnerable groups within their potential audience.28 In addition to radio broadcasting, Krutov and his wife have continued the activities of their publishing house (also called Russian House), producing either nationalist pamphlets critical of the government or essays on Russian Orthodoxy. Their recent publications include two 2003 volumes by Nikolai Leonov, Russia’s Way of the Cross (Krestnii put’ Rossii) and Troublesome Time (Likholetie); a collection of articles by the Communist Sergei Kara-Murza; an essay by the Orthodox writer Viktor Trostnikov; and a book by the nationalist Orthodox priest Aleksandr Shargunov entitled The Last Weapon (Poslednee oruzhie). The publishing house has also released the documentary video film Russian Cross (Russkii krest), produced by journalist Andrei Polushin. The entire series of Russian House broadcasts can also be purchased on video in a special store in the centre of Moscow, and are readily available in various church bookshops. Since 1999 the Krutovs have been editing a monthly magazine with the same title. The periodical Russian House is sponsored by the Foundation of Russian Culture and has been blessed by Patriarch Aleksii II. Indeed, Russian House has a demonstrably close relationship with the Russian church hierarchy. Krutov is the editor-in-chief of the magazine, and the abovementioned Leonov, Trostnikov and Archimandrite Tikhon are all members of the editorial board. Furthermore, the magazine is printed on the Sretenskii monastery presses. The motto of the magazine is ‘For those who love Russia’, and roughly half of the issues deal with Russian Orthodox topics: holidays, traditions, rituals, monuments, church organizations, dialogues between priests and readers and so on. The rest of the issues (see, for example, no. 10, 2003) are composed of extremist political articles, nostalgic historical essays expounding a radical Slavophile ideology and hegemonic international comments, such as the piece on Russian interests in the Balkans written by Borislav Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian ambassador to Moscow. Also in 2003 Russian House ran an anonymous and highly provocative article entitled ‘Time to Be Russian’, which proclaimed that the Russian nation was composed of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians,29 not unlike the aforementioned manifesto of the Russian National Unity party. It is notable that a recent issue (no. 4, 2004) contains articles written by a United Russia Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin (on Orthodox Slavic unity) and by academician Igor’ Shafarevich (on the necessity of a

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genuine and strong Russian state). This issue also contains an interview with Iurii Poliakov, the editor-in-chief of the popular periodical Literary Newspaper (Literaturnaia gazeta), which reveals his anti-liberal affiliations. 30 As the publication in 2004 of an official speech by Dmitrii Rogozin as the head of the Motherland faction shows, the magazine is clearly claiming to speak for this movement.31 Arguably, Russian House magazine is seeking to play a leading role in the consolidation of Russian intellectual nationalism, an increasingly evident phenomenon. Conclusion There remain some taboos for Russian nationalists in the arena of television and radio media. Open demands for repressive or aggressive measures against ethnic minorities, overt antisemitic propaganda and similar demonstrations of racism are still rarer on television than they are in print media, especially in radical nationalist or Communist-nationalist forums, such as the Communist papers Tomorrow (Zavtra) and Soviet Russia (Sovetskaia Rossiia), or Russian Order (Russkii poriadok), the newspaper of Russian National Unity. Various contemporary polls demonstrate that antisemitism on a mass level in Russia should neither be neglected, nor exaggerated; for instance, in public opinion Jews rank next to last among sixteen groups that were sometimes blamed for the country’s economic problems. But simplifying this problem could have a misleading effect. No doubt, the unprecedented growth of influence of ethnic Jews in business and governmental structures has inspired a new level of antisemitism among Russians who are more affected by scapegoating in a situation of growing uncertainty and dissatisfaction.32 Vladimir Tismaneanu, a prominent expert on post-socialist transition, argues: In spite of the venomous antisemitic and anti-Western pamphlets issued by Ziuganov and his allies, Russia’s new urban middle class has little sympathy for such ethnocentric outbursts. This popular rejection of ethnic scapegoating also appeared in a poll taken in 1996: out of two thousand Russians asked which of ten groups were responsible for the country’s economic crisis, the lowest number (9%) blamed the Jews. One cannot speak of state antisemitism in any of these countries.33

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This—generally speaking—is correct, but Tismaneanu’s description needs to be updated. Public expressions of antisemitism have increased since 1999, as evidenced by the vulgar and scandalous remarks of Albert Makashov and Viktor Iliukhin, then deputies of the State Duma and leaders of the Movement for Support of the Army, as well as KPRF activists. More recently, antisemitic attitudes and sentiments have accelerated in association with the Putin administration’s fight against selected oligarchs: Boris Berezovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii, and Mikhail Khodorkovskii, all of whom are of Jewish descent. This power struggle has been perceived (and presented) by some as a ‘patriotic struggle’ against the ‘Jewish conspiracy’. Within the context of the endless Chechen conflict, the threat of new terrorist actions in Russian cities, the complicated relations with Former Soviet Union countries and suspicions of the West, one might predict an increasing tendency towards nationalist discourse in the propaganda of various parties, not only the traditionally chauvinist ones. In the international context, the desire for the restoration of Russian superpower status has been in some ways provoked and accelerated by the recent Iraq war and continuing military conflict. If not censored by the Putin government or blocked by public opinion, nationalist slogans and remarks will continue to increase in Russian radio and television broadcasting for the foreseeable future.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8

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Sergei Zassorin, ‘Human and ethnic minority rights in an emerging political culture in Russia’, The Public. Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, 44–5. V. A. Babintsev and A. F. Berdnikov, Politicheskie partii sovremennoi Rossii i natsional’nii vopros: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1996), 6–10. Elena Vartanova, ‘Media v postsovetskoi Rossii: ikh struktura i vliianie’, Pro et Contra, vol. 5, no. 4, 2000, available on the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow website at http://pubs.carnegie.ru/p&c/vol5-2000/4/ (viewed 20 May 2004). Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Russian are by the author. A. V. Milehin and N. I. Popov (eds), Obshchestvennoe mnenie Rossii po sotsial’nopoliticheskim problemam (Moscow, 2000), 649. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow, 1998), 771. Boris Dubin, ‘Ot initsiativnikh grup k anonimnim media: massovie kommunikatsii v rossiiskom obshchestve’, Pro et Contra, vol. 5, no. 4, 2000, available on the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow website at http://pubs.carnegie.ru/p&c/ vol5-2000/4/ (viewed 20 May 2004). Sredstva massovoi informatsii Rossii: analiz, tendentsii, prognozi (Moscow, 1997), 114. Ibid., 315.

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Dubin. Vartanova. Dubin. For an English language summary of Dugin’s career and the significance of neo-eurasianism, see, for example, Victor Yasmann, ‘Aleksandr Dugin: Eurasia party founder and chief ideologue of the Russian geopolitical school’, from the RFE/RL special issue ‘The Russian Federation Votes: 2003–04’, at www.rferl.org/specials/russianelection/bio/dugin.asp (viewed 9 July 2004). Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (London, 2001), 193. Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Anatolii Papp and Vladimir Pribilovskii, Politicheskii ekstremizm v Rossii (Moscow, 1996), 262. Shenfield, 193. Kirill Kholodkovskii, ‘Biurokraticheskaia duma’, Polis, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, 11. Irina Busigina, ‘Kakie tsennosti v tsene?’, Polis, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, 18. See ‘Glava RPTs MP pozdravil zhurnal i teleprogrammu “Russkii dom” s dvoinym iubileem’, 17 October 2002, available at the Portal-credo.ru website at http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=news&id=3759 (viewed 28 May 2004). Kholodkovskii, 11. Igor’ Kliamkin, ‘Postmodernizm v traditsionalistskom prostranstve’, Polis, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, 19. ‘Rogozin nameren stroit’ sil’nuiu levuiu partiiu vopreki planam prezidentskoi administratsii’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 April 2004. ‘Ot patrioticheskogo informbiuro (Zaivlenie NPS)’, Zavtra, 23 January 2001. Aleksandr Verkhovskii (ed.), Iazik moi . . . Problema etnicheskoi i religioznoi neterpimosti v rossiiskikh SMI (Moscow, 2002), 197. Ibid., 198. Ibid. Dubin. Sredstva massovoi informatsii Rossii, 87. Andrei Samarskii, ‘Narodnoe radio’, Russkii dom, vol. 6, no. 4, 2004, 22–3. ‘Vremia byt’ russkim’, Russkii dom, vol. 5, no. 10, 2003, 25. ‘Conservativnaia revolutsiia Iuriia Poliakova’, Russkii dom, vol. 6, no. 4, 2004, 46–8. Dmitrii Rogozin, ‘Novoe–staroe’, Russkii dom, vol. 6, no. 5, 2004, 15. Zassorin, 48. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 98.

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‘HATE SPEECH’ IN THE MEDIA Monitoring Prejudice in the Russian Press Tanya Lokshina

The problem of the mass media being used to instigate national, religious and other types of enmity is not a new one. It is, however, usually discussed with regard to publications of a radical-nationalist character, the most notorious of which in Russia (and the one with the largest circulation) is the newspaper Tomorrow (Zavtra). But the same problem, though not in so overt a form, also exists in the ‘mainstream’, that is, in the press that is not marginal in circulation or in content. The concept of ‘hate speech’ is new in Russian society, ‘borrowed’ from English, and is employed in the context of this paper to cover the wide spectrum of language scrutinized in the recent monitoring project organized by several Russian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Ranging from overtly aggressive nationalist statements to ‘politically incorrect’ jokes and mildly offensive remarks about ethnic and religious minorities, this spectrum stretches the concept beyond its usual parameters. Nevertheless, ‘hate speech’ is a useful shorthand for the types of discourse discussed in this paper. There are a number of reasons why ‘hate speech’ has taken root in Russian society. The proliferation of racist tendencies in post-Soviet society and the general lack of tolerance with respect to ‘different’ cultures and religions have been exacerbated by the social and economic hardships faced by the majority of the population. The problem is also aggravated by the fact that critical scrutiny of the media by society as a whole and by NGOs in particular is insufficient. Unfortunately, moral condemnation of ‘hate speech’ in post-Soviet society remains feeble and sporadic. The general public perceives expressions of racism, xenophobia and prejudice as unavoidable facts of political and social life and, although perhaps not entirely pleasant, nothing to get unduly alarmed about.

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Nor do journalists and editors perceive ‘hate speech’ as a significant problem in contemporary Russia and, to date, the journalistic community has made relatively few attempts to condemn ‘hate speech’ emphatically. Since there are no ethical norms in place for the media to abide by in this respect, xenophobia is manifest in a variety of publications, including respectable socio-political periodicals and television and radio programmes. Background to the research The ‘hate speech’ project was initiated by several prominent NGOs (Moscow Helsinki Group, Panorama Information and Research Centre, Glasnost Defence Foundation and the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights) in the summer of 2001, and included monitoring of the press, analysis of the data collected, training for journalists and public campaigning against ‘hate speech’. The first stage of the monitoring was conducted in Moscow and five different regions of Russia from October 2001 to April 2002. The findings were presented an edited volume entitled Hate Speech—My Speech? The Problem of Ethnic and Religious Intolerance in Russian Mass Media, published in Russian in October 2002.1 The second stage of the monitoring was organized after the tragic events at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, when Chechen terrorists took the audience hostage during a performance, holding them from 23–6 October 2002 until the security services stormed the building and over a hundred hostages died. This period of monitoring went on for four months and targeted national mass media only. The results of the monitoring are available (in Russian only) on the website of the SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis. A third stage of the monitoring effort began in Moscow and, again, in five Russian provinces in the summer of 2003. The results could not be incorporated in this paper, but they are also available on the SOVA website.2 Research methodology During the mass media monitoring we deliberately focused on occurrences of ‘hate speech’ based exclusively on nationality, ethnicity or religion, basically because hatred based on these grounds is considered (at least in principle) to be reprehensible within the broadest strata of society, unlike, for example, homophobia, which is currently considered an acceptable, perhaps even ‘normal’ stance in Russian society. The monitoring project started from the principle that monitors should not consider themselves objective judges in the matter of what

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kind of language is acceptable in journalism. The acceptability or appropriateness of a great number of figures of speech is disputable, and the boundaries of ‘political correctness’ are conditional and flexible; indeed, in post-Soviet Russian society, they are barely defined at all. It is clear at the level of intuition that ‘hate speech’ can manifest itself in a variety of forms. First of all, the text content can significantly vary: from exhortations to genocide to the use of an offensive name for an ethnic group. This requires a certain categorization of ‘hate speech’, which will be discussed further on in this report. Second, ‘hate speech’ does not necessarily have to manifest itself in the actual text of the article: it can be detected in the headlines, in the choice of photographs or illustrations that accompany it, for example. A certain degree of subjectivity is inevitable in the assessments made, but this should not detract from the project findings: after all, ‘hate speech’ is designed to affect someone’s subjective perception and/or is generated by someone’s subjective perception. The mass media have flourished in Russia, and the project selected only a small number of publications for the first stage of the monitoring effort. Among those monitored during this stage were a number of national newspapers and Internet sites, as well as newspapers from five areas of the Russian Federation: St Petersburg, Krasnodar territory, Kemerovo, Perm and Riazan’ regions. The regions were deliberately selected so as to include those in which both high and low levels of ‘hate speech’ were expected, as well as to ensure a mix of both economically advanced and deprived areas. In addition, all areas differed in terms of the political orientation of their governing officials and represented different geographical zones of the country. The mass media selected were also chosen to ensure as diverse a mix as possible. The project monitored daily and weekly newspapers, papers with very different circulation figures (including those with the largest print-runs), media that differed in perceived levels of ‘respectability’ (ranging from newspapers targeted at ‘decision-makers’ to periodicals considered by many as ‘tabloids’), as well as media suspected of utilizing ‘hate speech’ to a greater or lesser extent. During the first stage of the monitoring (October 2001–April 2002) the national sampling included ten daily newspapers, five weeklies and five websites. In the regions, the mass media are considerably less diverse, so the number and type of regional periodicals subjected to scrutiny were more limited. We monitored five periodicals per region, most of which were weekly newspapers. Two primary characteristics of ‘hate speech’ were taken into account for each publication monitored, namely, ‘category’ or type and

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‘object’ or target. A certain hierarchy of ‘hate speech’ categories was developed, incorporating a broad spectrum of prejudiced discourse from the most blatant and effectively illegal (e.g. direct calls to violence and discrimination based on nationality or religion) to the most benign (e.g. ‘politically incorrect’ ethnic jokes or gratuitous mentions of an individual’s ethnic or religious background in a clearly negative context). Data monitoring also allowed for the fact that one text might contain several types of ‘hate speech’ simultaneously. In developing a means of classifying the objects of ‘hate speech’, the monitoring schema included both broad categories, such as ‘nonRussians’, ‘non-Orthodox Christians’, ‘non-Whites’ etc., and specific, narrow groups identified in advance as likely targets (e.g. Chechens, Azeris, Jews). During the initial stage of the monitoring, these categories were modified slightly to reflect more accurately the empirical data. They were also reassessed prior to the second stage of the monitoring project. Finally, texts were also categorized according to the position of the author. Monitors distinguished between a positive, neutral or negative attitude adopted by the author of an article towards ‘hate speech’ elements in the text. Journalists are not always the generators of ‘hate speech’, they may be citing other speakers and expressing their own attitude towards the quoted material, i.e. supporting it to a greater or lesser extent, condemning it to a greater or lesser extent, or maintaining a completely neutral position. A brief analysis of the first stage of monitoring: October 2001– April 2002 In terms of the categories of ‘hate speech’, it was immediately apparent that the leading category in the October 2001–April 2002 monitoring stage was ‘the promotion of a negative image of an ethnic or religious group’. More than 25 per cent of all instances of a positive attitude taken by journalists towards ‘hate speech’ fell into this category, although this type of ‘hate speech’ also evoked a significant number of negative responses from the authors, twice as many in comparison to any other type of ‘hate speech’. In second place among ‘hate speech’ categories evoking positive responses by journalists were ‘accusations of criminality’. This might have been predicted: the suggestion that an ethnic or religious group is intrinsically criminal is a pervasive and well-known form of xenophobia worldwide. However, the level of condemnation of this category of ‘hate speech’ was also rather high.

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A consistently negative reaction was provoked only by overt or covert calls for discrimination or violence, and practically all of these articles were about the widely feared skinhead groups. Very rarely did the monitors encounter instances of a positive response to these categories of ‘hate speech’, and no such response was observable at the national level. Another significant category of ‘hate speech’ in terms of data analysis was ‘the accusation that an ethnic or religious group exerts a negative influence on society and the state (in terms of the “erosion of national identity” etc.)’. This category proved significant because it incorporates the type of article that explains the search for national identity in terms of the ‘us versus them’ principle. This approach is identifiable not only in the traditional Russia–West and Slav–non-Slav schema, but is also reflected in the ‘conflict of civilizations’ paradigm that has become very popular since 11 September. Interestingly, this category almost never evoked a neutral reaction by the author, while negative responses were only three times fewer than positive ones. If we focus on the objects of ‘hate speech’ we see that, in first place (combining the statistics for positive and neutral attitudes of the journalist to ‘hate speech’ directed at that group), came the general targets of ‘undefined ethnic xenophobia’ (seventy cases), followed by Meskhetian Turks (forty-eight cases, virtually all of which were taken from the Krasnodar media), people from the Caucasus (forty-five instances), Americans of the United States (forty-four), Jews (forty), people from non-CIS Asia (thirty-six), Roma (thirty-four), Chechens (thirty-two), Muslims (twenty-seven) and other. If all the statistics for ‘hate speech’ objects linked with the Caucasus were combined, they would far outstrip other objects. Certain objects of ‘hate speech’, it would appear from data collected during this first period, are generally considered unacceptable targets. Racism directed at ‘non-Whites’ was supported in only two and condemned in eight cases. However, negative attitudes towards ‘hate speech’ directed at the specific group of Africans only slightly outweighed the positive. An unexpected and interesting result was the rather high proportion of journalists prepared to defend peoples from the Caucuses against prejudiced remarks. In twenty-eight instances, ‘hate speech’ against this category evoked a negative response from the author, in comparison to the thirtyeight instances in which the journalist supported ‘hate speech’ with respect to peoples of the Caucasus. In percentage terms, only Jews found more defenders. It would appear that prejudice against individuals from the Caucuses is relatively broadly (although not yet sufficiently) perceived by

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journalists as unacceptable. However, if we focus on more concrete objects of ‘hate speech’—Chechens and Azeris (to say nothing of the Armenians, Meskhetian Turks and Kurds that are the targets of press vilification in Krasnodar territory)—the picture looks somewhat different. Apparently, the theoretical condemnation or avoidance of ‘hate speech’ directed at broad, rather abstract groups such as ‘non-Whites’ or ‘people of the Caucuses’ is one thing, whereas xenophobia directed at various ‘real’ ethnic groups is a totally different phenomenon. The 11 September factor It is clear that certain events intensify ‘hate speech’ with respect to specific objects. One such example is the February 2002 outburst (albeit a rather minor one) of religious xenophobia in the national mass media that exclusively targeted Catholics, and marked the beginning of a largescale, anti-Catholic campaign following the decision of the Vatican to establish dioceses in Russia. During the same period, another outburst of ‘hate speech’ was observed in the press of Krasnodar territory, which was also easily explainable: the governor had initiated a new campaign against migrants. The most profound impact on the monitoring was produced by the tragic events of 11 September 2001 and the discussions about Afghanistan that followed. Since global and political issues are more often addressed in the national than the regional press, 11 September and its aftermath affected monitoring at the national level to a greater extent. Certainly, these events had a noticeable affect on the choice of targets or objects of ‘hate speech’. Xenophobia targeting the categories of Muslims, Arabs and Americans intensified simultaneously (the multiple speculations that ‘this tragedy was America’s own fault’ were only one step away from ‘Americans are themselves to blame’). At the national level, during the first three months of the monitoring (October–December 2001), five out of ten instances of ‘hate speech’ with respect to ‘Asian peoples’ (those outside of the CIS boundaries) were supported by the author of the article, and three out of four with respect to ‘peoples of Central Asia’. Two out of three instances of ‘hate speech’ directed at Arabs were viewed favourably, all three instances of ‘hate speech’ aimed at Americans and both instances directed at Afghans were reported or presented favourably. The single instance of ‘hate speech’ directed at Pakistanis, and most shockingly, all eleven instances directed at the broad category of ‘Muslims’, were positively presented by journalists. No such disproportion was observed with respect to other objects of

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‘hate speech’ except Ukrainians, but all five references fell within the month of October and related to the Israeli aircraft that was destroyed by a Ukrainian missile that month. However, the direct effect produced by the 11 September tragedy wore itself out rather quickly. After Dubrovka. The second stage of monitoring: 24 October 2002–23 February 2003 In deciding to conduct an interim monitoring of the national mass media during the period of four months following this very public tragedy in Moscow, we started from the assumption that these events could not help but affect the ‘hate speech’ situation in the mass media. Methodologically, this monitoring differs very little from the previous stage; some categories were slightly modified and, due to financial constraints, the monitoring was conducted only at the national level. Some of the media monitored did change, however. During this stage, the monitoring included four daily and six weekly socio-political programmes broadcast on national television channels, whereas websites were excluded since data collated during the previous stage of monitoring revealed that ‘hate speech’ is very rarely used by news-orientated websites in comparison to the print media. A total of 804 instances of ‘hate speech’ were recorded during the four months. Since certain texts and programmes contained several categories and objects of ‘hate speech’, and several records had to be created to account for each instance, this number is larger than the number of texts and programmes selected. It is worth noting that the figures turned out to be several times larger than the figures obtained during the first stage of the monitoring at the national level, although the volume of material monitored was approximately the same. Results were also more unevenly distributed with regard to the position of article’s author:

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Support for ‘hate speech’

Neutral

Monitoring stage 1

120

26

72

218

Monitoring stage 2

416

263

125

804

207

Condemnation of ‘hate speech’

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Total

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Undoubtedly this is to a large extent due to the Dubrovka events, and further on we consider the pattern of modifications undergone by the ‘hate speech’ usage during the total monitoring period, which allows for a more precise hypothesis. The facing table lists the types or categories of ‘hate speech’ identified in the national press during this period, and the attitude of the author or reporter to that ‘hate speech’: positive (support), neutral or negative (condemnation). The obvious leader here is ‘mentioning a group in a pejorative context’. This category is in fact very broad, as it included all generally offensive or pejorative statements referring to ethnic groups for which a more substantive accusation (such as ‘moral deficiency’ or ‘criminality’) could not be identified. It incorporated the majority of ethnic jokes and non-specific, derogatory remarks. In second place comes ‘claims about moral deficiencies’, unsurprisingly, since this sort of judgement about ‘other’ groups is widespread in everyday life. It is important to note that authors treat this type of ‘hate speech’ in a wide variety of ways, and the level of reflection in addressing this issue is much higher. Accusations of intellectual or creative deficiency are much less frequent and, interestingly, in percentage terms, are rarely viewed negatively by authors. Possibly such an accusation is perceived as acceptable since it does not relate to more fundamental moral qualities of a group, but another possible explanation is that the main target of this category of ‘hate speech’ is Americans (see the table of ‘type-objects’ on page 210) and this type of accusation with respect to Americans is a well-established cliché not only in Russia but in Europe generally. It is also worth noting that mild ‘hate speech’ in the national press with respect to all targets increased after the Dubrovka Theatre events. Also widespread are ‘claims about criminality’. Significantly, most authors adopted a positive attitude towards this category of ‘hate speech’ during this period, which may reflect the aggressive anti-terrorist campaign of the government after the event. The typical ‘anti-migrant’ category—‘accusations of negative influence’—occupied a rather modest position during this period, and a rather more substantial percentage of authors viewed this latter type of ‘hate speech’ negatively. Even more impressive is the largely negative attitude towards the most dangerous categories of ‘hate speech’, direct calls for violence and discrimination. However, during the previous stage of monitoring at the national level these categories of ‘hate speech’ were never viewed positively, and during this period a substantial proportion found them

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TANYA LOKSHINA

Type

Support

Overt calls for violence

Condemnation

Total

9

3

23

35

Overt calls for discrimination

12

6

21

39

Covert calls for violence and discrimination

13

3

6

22

Promotion of a negative image of a group

10

2

5

17

Justification of historical facts of violence and discrimination

2

1

1

4

Questioning of universally accepted historical facts of violence and discrimination

0

0

1

1

Claims about deficiency of a group

56

19

6

81

3

1

4

8

Claims about criminality of a group

66

13

10

89

Claims about moral deficiencies of a group

111

33

24

168

Claims about disproportionate representation

45

6

14

65

Accusations of negative influence exerted by a group

23

7

16

46

Mentioning a group or its representatives in a pejorative or insulting context

180

185

44

409

29

4

16

49

Quotation of clearly xenophobic statements without due comment

5

15

0

20

Accusations of territorial expansion and power seizure attempts

9

0

1

10

573

298

192

1063

Claims about historical crimes committed by a group

Calls to prohibit settlement of representatives of a group in a given area

Total

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209

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Object

Support

Neutral

Condemnation

Total

Africans

13

11

3

27

Americans

53

15

1

69

Western Europeans

29

12

3

44

Jews

28

12

33

73

Ukrainians

11

3

1

15

Russians

19

17

10

46

Gypsies

9

7

1

17

Tadjiks

5

4

1

10

Chinese

21

10

0

31

4

5

0

9

105

89

24

218

Armenians

7

3

4

14

Azerbaijanis

10

7

5

22

Iraqis

1

0

0

1

Arabs (except Iraqi)

9

2

0

11

Meskhetian Turks

1

0

1

2

Caucasus peoples (except Chechens, Armenians or Azerbaijanis)

11

19

4

34

Caucasians as a whole

27

19

25

71

Peoples of Asia (inside or outside the CIS except groups listed)

16

6

2

24

Other ethnic categories

47

30

9

86

General ethnic xenophobia

9

6

7

22

Orthodox Christians

3

1

6

10

25

8

4

37

5

4

5

14

11

4

3

18

8

2

7

17

487

296

159

942

Vietnamese Chechens

Muslims Catholics and Uniate church members New and small religious groups Other religious categories Total

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acceptable. The positive attitude of authors towards calls for violence during this period was almost exclusively the prerogative of a quite respectable, mainstream newspaper, The News (Izvestiia), and could be found not only in published ‘letters to the editor’. The overwhelming number of ‘hate speech’ references to Chechens is hardly surprising, given the hostage-taking incident of 23–6 October 2002. In the first monitoring period Chechens accounted for only 5 per cent of ‘hate speech’ targets, compared to the 25 per cent at this stage of the monitoring. The only positive point that can be made about this is that a small but not insignificant number of journalists chose to condemn ‘hate speech’ against Chechens. Public attitudes towards Americans also became noticeably more hostile during this period. As a rule, accusations directed against them were not associated with current politics at all (recalling that the project only incorporated statements with respect to an ethnic group or its representatives as such, not statements relating to the government or politics of a country). There is no doubt, however, that the rise of anti-Americanism was directly associated with the looming war in Iraq. The unexpected rise of animosity towards Western Europeans was also accounted for by specific political reasons: the Chechen congress in Copenhagen and the subsequent (failed) attempts to extradite Akhmed Zakaev. This is surprising because anti-westernism in Russia has usually boiled down to anti-Americanism, and because there were very few protests against such ‘hate speech’. That said, people from the Caucuses far outstrip Americans and Western Europeans in the animosity ratings, even without Chechens. There is a clear regression too. For example, the very noticeable level of animosity with respect to Muslims has no corresponding rise in negative attitudes towards it, although public acceptance of a multi-religious world and respect for other religions (or at least those considered ‘traditional’) had been generally achieved in post-Soviet Russian society prior to this period. What matters is obviously not the abstract idea of a ‘religious Other’ (suffice it to compare the figures on Muslims with figures on Catholics during this period) but a radical change of public perception in response to particular events, such as the Dubrovka Theatre tragedy or the opening of Russian dioceses by the Roman Catholic Church. The dramatic growth in the number of manifestations of hostility towards Jews (by almost six times in comparison to the first stage of the monitoring), counting only those texts in which the author defends or adopts a positive attitude towards the ‘hate speech’, is astonishing. Generally

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speaking, however, the proportion of antisemitism decreased against the background of a general growth in xenophobia. This general growth in xenophobia may account for the surprising rise in anti-Chinese sentiment, despite the fact that there was no obvious political event to provoke this rise in hostility. The same can be said about Africans; the figures are more modest but the trend is similar. If we compare the categories and objects of ‘hate speech’ we see that Africans (and other nationalities with whom there is no obvious political feud) are more likely to experience lapses of ‘political correctness’ rather than overt enmity in the press. Although Chechens—the most obvious political target—also face this sort of mild ‘hate speech’, they were the target of the largest number of calls for violence against them, as well as the greatest number of accusations that they are inherently criminal. It should be added, however, that Iraqis and Arabs in general (if not hidden under the ‘Muslim’ label) very rarely found themselves the object of ‘hate speech’, despite the fact that they were in the media spotlight throughout this entire period. Comparing statistics in the months following the Dubrovka tragedy (monitoring newspapers from 24 October 2002), we see that in the second month the level of ‘hate speech’ decreased almost two-fold in comparison with the first month, and in the third month by almost another two-fold (although the winter holidays played a certain role in this process, as many periodicals were not published during that period). In the fourth month after the tragedy the level of xenophobia stabilized, but nevertheless remained above the level observed prior to the Dubrovka events. Calls for violence and discrimination supported or condoned by authors may have been concentrated in the first month after Dubrovka, but they did not disappear completely. As already observed, during the previous monitoring no such calls were observed at the national level. On the whole, the total number of instances of a positive attitude by authors towards ‘hate speech’ in the final month of monitoring was fifty-one, in contrast to the thirteen instances recorded in the analogous month during previous monitoring (April 2002, national level). In another words, the index of support for ‘hate speech’ post-Dubrovka is almost four times larger. It is also interesting to study the dynamics with regard to groups generally associated with the Dubrovka events: Chechens, all peoples from the Caucuses as a whole (excluding Chechens) and Muslims. If all instances of ‘hate speech’ targeted at these groups and supported or condoned by the author (in other words, written about by authors who

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have adopted a positive or neutral position in respect of the ‘hate speech’) are combined, the results are as follows:

Months after October 23 1

2

3

4

134

35

9

8

Other Caucasians

38

24

13

23

Muslims

17

7

3

5

Chechens

How are these developments to be explained? One may assume that xenophobia directed at Europeans was associated with the Zakaev case, although the actual coverage of the Zakaev case revealed no such dynamic. As for Americans, the theme of Iraq stayed in the media spotlight throughout these months and debate increased rather than decreased during this period. But why the public perception of Jews should be affected during this period is simply impossible to explain, and the ‘post-Dubrovka’ decline is far less noticeable where they are concerned. On the whole, the proportion of anti-western xenophobia increased in comparison with the previous stage of monitoring, whereas even the proportion of animosity towards ‘people from the Caucuses’ declined. Recalling that this monitoring period was completed three weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, we can say that the Moscow terrorist attack combined with the Iraq crisis resulted in not only a powerful increase of anti-Chechen sentiment and an overall growth of xenophobia, but also in a rise of anti-western sentiment that outstripped any other increase. One might have expected Dubrovka to have emotionally eclipsed Iraq, but this does not seem to have happened. Conclusion The third stage of our monitoring project, based on the same methodology, started in September 2003. It is already evident that the level of ‘hate speech’ in the Russian media has not declined, despite the absence of any events serving to intensify racial, ethnic and religious animosity. There is also evidence of a clear increase in ‘hate speech’ with regard to Jews and Africans, although it is too early for us to draw any definite

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conclusions in this regard other than to observe a noticeable shift in media-generated animosity towards these two groups. The state is powerless to control the spread of xenophobia in the mainstream media because the problem of curbing mild ‘hate speech’ is highly complex and no effective mechanisms have been devised to counter this trend. This in itself is hardly surprising, since the state has thus far proved incapable of solving a much simpler task, the combating of blatant ‘hate speech’ in the radical-nationalist media. Arguably, the most workable solution to the problem of ‘hate speech’ in the mainstream media would be to have the situation controlled not by the state but by the wider journalistic community. Self-regulation should be introduced in the form of a code of professional ethics and corporate rules with regard to the appropriate coverage of ethnic and religious issues. However, there have been such attempts and, so far, none have proved successful. This research also clearly demonstrates that the problem of ‘hate speech’ is not of interest to the journalistic community. Whenever this phenomenon is discussed in the print media—which happens only rarely—the discussion is initiated usually not by journalists themselves but by readers disturbed or hurt by a particular publication. The concept of ‘political correctness’, as a rule, remains the target of sarcastic jokes in the media rather than a subject for serious discussion. Unfortunately, it is hard to see what might be done to promote an earnest debate on the topic, and without such a debate no improvement is likely. Notes 1 Alexandr Verkhovskii (ed.), Iazik moi . . . Problema etnicheskoi i religioznoi neterpimosti v rossiiskikh SMI (Moscow, 2002). 2 See ‘Natsionalizm i ksenofobiia’, available at the SOVA website at http://xeno.sovacenter.ru/213716E/21728E3/349455B (viewed 20 May 2004).

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MAKING VIRTUAL (NON)SENSE OF THE PAST Russian Nationalist Interpretations of

Twentieth-century History on the Internet Francis King

Although most Russians do not yet have Internet access at home, and printed material retains its importance in the battle of ideas within Russian society, there are sound reasons for concentrating on online material when investigating contemporary Russian nationalist ideas. The fluidity of the Internet, with material continually appearing and disappearing, means that a survey of its content provides a snapshot of ideas in circulation at any given time. Published articles and books are often available for download free of charge on the Russian-language Internet—when western publishers attempt to restrict access to subscribers only—and publishers of nationalist material are no exception. The contents of ‘national-patriotic’ newspapers such as Tomorrow (Zavtra) and Our Contemporary (Nash sovremennik) are freely available on well-organized, archived websites, while other sites make virtual libraries available. The sheer quantity of material available ensures that few ideological currents are unrepresented online, and this paper focuses on the presentation of Soviet history on Russian nationalist websites—in particular their treatment of the revolution and Stalinism—in order to assess the ideological traffic in October 2003. Two trends in Russian nationalist thought Post-Soviet Russian nationalist thought encompasses a wide range of political and philosophical positions, many of which are logically incompatible. The most important single division is between religiously inspired and secular nationalism. Russian religious nationalism follows the old Black

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Hundred slogans of ‘Orthodoxy, autocracy and the Russian national spirit’ and ‘Faith, Tsar and Fatherland’,1 and takes a sharply negative attitude to at least the early Soviet period of Russian history. Orthodox Christianity is seen as one of the defining characteristics of Russianness, and antisemitism is very much the norm. Russian secular nationalism is mainly concerned with the state. Its adherents generally style themselves ‘patriots’ rather than nationalists. Their attitudes to the Soviet period of Russian history are generally positive, although opinions of the Tsarist period vary. Secular nationalism in Russia today is particularly associated with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its allies, although the spectrum embraces authoritarian currents on both the far left and the far right. Antisemitism is prevalent, but not universal, among secular nationalists. Making (non)sense of the revolution: religious nationalists How could the supposedly authentically Russian state and social structure of Tsarism fall in February 1917 with so little obvious regret on the part of the Great Russian population? Black Hundred nationalists generally try to account for this by ignoring popular social ferment, stressing the ethnic origins of the revolutionaries and relying heavily on conspiracy theory. The most prolific author in this category is Oleg Platonov, who offers a textbook example of conspiracy theory in his multi-volume History of the Russian People in the Twentieth Century. For Platonov, ‘the revolution of 1917 did not have a social, but a national, anti-Russian character. It was directed against Russian civilization and its bearer—the Russian people.’2 The Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 was secured by traitors in the army and state apparatus working with the ‘ruling elites of the Entente’, whereas the street disorders in Petrograd at the same time were ‘instigated by German agents’.3 The Provisional Government that emerged after February 1917 represented ‘the domination of Russia by Freemasons’, consciously pursuing the aim of destroying the Russian state and army. Platonov does not explain why the ‘ruling elites of the Entente’ should seek to implant a government that would pursue such an aim in war-time. For him, the Provisional Government was not an ineffectual administration of well-meaning liberals and moderate socialists, but a vicious tyranny: The patriotic parties, which counted millions of Russian people among their ranks, were declared illegal. . . . Pogroms against

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Russian people, carried out by Masonic and Jewish activists, took on a mass character. . . . Freemasons repressed tens of thousands of patriotically minded people . . . physical and moral terror against Russian people became the norm of Masonic statehood . . .4 In 1917, Platonov argues: Russia split into two unequal, opposed parts. On the one side— the overwhelming majority of the native Russian people, above all peasants . . . On the other side—the relatively small ‘revolutionary masses’ (no more than 5–10 per cent of the population), composed of opponents of Russian spiritual values, intellectuals without national consciousness . . . anti-Russian nationalists, above all Jews, and déclassé and criminal elements.5 His account contains no hint at all of the mass peasant movement that swept Russia in 1917. Reliance on conspiracy theories means that he has no need to examine any economic, social or other factors underlying the revolution. The devotedly monarchist ‘native Russians’ succumbed so meekly to the malign ‘revolutionary masses’ because they were ‘deprived of their leaders’.6 Figures such as General L. G. Kornilov are dismissed as ‘pseudo-leaders’, and Kornilov’s military rebellion in August 1917 was doomed because ‘it had a republican-cosmopolitan character and could not find support among the Russian people’.7 If the Entente allies and the Masons are the main villains of February 1917, Germans, Jews and other ‘aliens’ are the main villains of October. Platonov makes great play of the real or alleged Jewish origins of the Bolshevik leaders, casually equating ‘non-Russian’ and ‘anti-Russian’. He also dwells on Bolshevik dealings with Germany before and after October 1917. The resulting picture is somewhat confusing: in 1918 Germany is supposedly both receiving payments from the Bolshevik government and subsidizing that government simultaneously.8 Finally, Platonov presents the national movements in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic as entirely artificial, German creations. Thus, for example, ‘in Little Russia [Ukraine] already in March 1917 the socalled Central Rada emerged, with active financial support from the Austro-German secret services . . . headed by the Mason and AustroGerman agent, M. S. Hrushevsky . . .’ 9 The noted mathematician and former dissident, Igor’ Shafarevich, argues that communism was always a westernizing doctrine, incompatible

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in principle with ‘Russianness’.10 In a recent work, The Three Thousand Year Mystery, Shafarevich discusses the history of the Jews, including in relation to the Russian revolution. Like Platonov, he assumes without question the existence of a conspiracy against Russians, although his treatment of the matter is more sophisticated. In Shafarevich’s presentation, the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement were mainly responsible for its harsher aspects. This stemmed from their alienation from, and hostility to, the Russian peasantry. Shafarevich’s main method is to list Jewish leaders of various organizations to create the impression of a vast, co-ordinated penetration. He writes: ‘One gets the impression that in order to join the top stratum of people in power [after October 1917] . . . those who were not Jews, or did not have at least some Jewish antecedents, had to have a Jewish wife . . .’; but he later concedes: ‘Of course, the post-revolutionary period was not simply an epoch of “Jewish power”. . .’ 11 Innuendo, interspersed with the occasional qualification, is typical of Shafarevich’s style. Vadim Kozhinov, who died in 2001, was far more erudite and sophisticated. His work is generally measured, and enjoys considerable authority within and beyond Russian nationalist circles. He sees the USSR as a phase of a much longer, peculiarly Russian, historical development. In this regard he follows the Slavophile thinkers of the nineteenth century, who criticized attempts to impose western ideas and values on Russian society. Kozhinov’s work History of Russia: Twentieth Century deals in detail with the revolution and the succeeding decades.12 He writes from an avowedly pro-Black Hundred standpoint, while frankly admitting that the movement and its ideals were doomed. Like other writers of this tendency, Kozhinov sees February 1917 as the moment at which the old Russia was destroyed. Again, the spectre of Freemasonry looms large in his account of events. Discussing the overthrow of Tsarism, he asserts that, ‘bound by their [Masonic] vows . . . very different, often seemingly quite incompatible politicians—from Octobrists to Mensheviks—worked towards their single goal in a disciplined and purposeful way . . .’13 Economic factors are subordinated to the conspiracy: the bread shortages in Petrograd in February 1917 had been ‘artificially organized’, and the demonstrations that resulted were ‘specially organized and used by the leaders of the coup’.14 However, unlike Platonov, Kozhinov does not imagine that the Russian masses in 1917 were devoted servants of the old order. Along with the Masonic machinations at the top, there was an authentic ‘Russian insurgency’ (russkii bunt) from below. This insurrectionary tendency of Russians means that, for Kozhinov, ‘the very existence of Russia is simply

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impossible and unthinkable without a powerful and firm state power; power of the West European type, of which the heroes of February dreamt, is obviously and completely unsuitable . . .’15 This belief in the need for order colours Kozhinov’s attitude to the Bolsheviks, whom he regards as having ‘struggled not for socialismcommunism, but to retain and consolidate power’ 16 during the war communism period of 1918–21. In this respect, Kozhinov differs quite radically from other contemporary religious nationalists considered here. He is not particularly concerned with the Jewish origins of the Bolshevik leaders, and does not regard them as an alien conspiracy against the Russian people. Indeed, in his presentation of the civil war, the Red side is the more patriotic. Although ‘the struggle between the Red and White armies was in no way a struggle between the “new” and “old” powers; it was a struggle between two “new” powers, the February and October’,17 it was the Whites who were in league with unfriendly foreign states. In this way, Kozhinov straddles the divide between the religious/Black Hundred and the Soviet/patriotic currents of nationalism. Making (non)sense of the revolution: Soviet patriots Communist historians respond in various ways to the challenges posed by 1917, and not all of them adopt a ‘national-patriotic’ perspective. The most prolific Communist writer who tries to place the revolution into a broader nationalist narrative is Sergei Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza clearly owes a considerable debt to Vadim Kozhinov. Again, for Kara-Murza, the USSR was the continuation of a long tradition of Russian statehood. He has a high regard for the traditional, patriarchal, communal values of the Russian peasantry—a position that he reconciles with his sympathy for the Bolsheviks in a peculiar way. KaraMurza criticizes the reign of Nicholas II, and particularly P. A. Stolypin, Nicholas’s prime minister from 1906 to 1911. Stolypin is denounced not only for his liberal application of the death penalty in the aftermath of the 1905–7 uprisings, but particularly for the breaking up of traditional peasant communes by encouraging private land ownership. To Kara-Murza, ‘this was an incomparably deeper upheaval than, for example, the transformation of the traditional society of Tsarist Russia into a traditional society of the Soviet type’.18 Hostility to western-style economic and political institutions is the key to his attitude to 1917: The break-up of Russia’s way of life and statehood took place in February 1917. The Tsar was overthrown by the generals and the

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westernizing Masons who stood behind them, not by the Bolsheviks . . . The February revolution was a revolution of westernizers, and its main aim was to clear the field for financial and trading capital. This was the first ‘revolution of the Chubaises and Gaidars’, although socialist slogans were shouted in abundance . . . The Bolsheviks took no part at all in the February revolution . . . It was Kerensky’s democrats who destroyed the army, dispersed the police, paralysed the economy and transport and set the peasants against one another.19 Identifying the White movement with the February democrats, Kara-Murza claims that the civil war ‘was not between the Bolsheviks and “Old Russia”, but between different contingents of revolutionaries. The civil war was a “war between February and October”. . . It was the Berezovskiis and Sobchaks of the beginning of the [twentieth] century, together with the bloody butcher B. Savinkov, who rose against the Bolsheviks . . .’20 All this allows him to conclude that ‘the Bolsheviks, as life itself soon showed, came as restorers, the resurrectors of the Russian empire killed by February, albeit in a new guise. Sooner or later this came to be recognized by the Bolsheviks’ opponents, including V. Shul’gin and even Denikin.’21 Although these arguments have been lifted straight from Kozhinov, Kara-Murza presents the case in a cruder fashion than his mentor. Moreover, he follows the overall approach of nationalist writers of the right in regarding ‘Jews’ as an undifferentiated whole, clearly distinguishable conceptually, if not physically, from ‘Russians’.22 For example, discussing the Soviet government’s campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church around 1922, he singles out Jewish Bolsheviks (Trotsky and others) as the principal driving force that had to be restrained by Lenin, Kalinin and Molotov. 23 He goes on to write of the ‘general mercilessness’ not only of Jewish Bolsheviks, but of ‘many prominent Jews, including enemies of the Bolsheviks, even émigrés . . .’24 It is sufficient to remember that these ‘émigrés’ included the largely Jewish leadership of the Menshevik Party— the democratic conscience of Russian Marxism—to appreciate the absurdity of Kara-Murza’s stereotyping. Making (non)sense of everything: Vladimir Zhirinovskii A tendency in Russian nationalist writing that virtually defies classification is that represented by Vladimir Zhirinovskii, leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). Zhirinovskii claims authorship of all texts on the LDPR website, and is the subject of many of

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them, which makes his organization more like a cult than a party. His Enemies of Russia, published in 1995, could almost be a spoof of Russian nationalist mythology. 25 In just over 200 delirious pages he manages to conflate a bewildering variety of conspiracy theories into a narrative of one massive co-ordinated onslaught against Russia, involving Freemasons, Bolsheviks, democrats, the CIA, capitalists, Communists, Nazis and, of course, Jews. His basic thesis is that both the revolution of 1917 and the disintegration of the USSR after 1985 were phases in the realization of a plan for world domination first elaborated in 1871 by the US Freemason Albert Pike. This is an ongoing world conspiracy, ‘dominated by a certain “occult” ruling group of Jewish world bankers, with the assistance of Zionism and Freemasonry, the main driving force of which is Zionist Jews . . .’26 The mechanism of this plan is simple. The Zionists ‘first implant or support revolutionary movements and socialism during the phase of the destruction of the preceding order, and then strive to destroy socialism and replace it with their own system’.27 Zhirinovskii’s style is incoherent, unsystematic and completely indiscriminate in its use of sources and arguments. For instance, he ‘quotes’ Trotsky as saying in 1917: ‘. . . we shall spill such rivers of blood, compared to which all the human losses of the capitalist wars will shudder and blanch. The biggest bankers from abroad will work in the closest contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall crush Russia . . .’28 The ‘source’ for this bloodcurdling statement is given as the memoirs of Rasputin’s secretary Aron Simanovich, who does not, in fact, even mention Trotsky. In relation to Stalin’s close colleague L. M. Kaganovich, Zhirinovskii is even more fanciful, claiming that in 1915 (aged 22!) Kaganovich became ‘Rabbi of All Russia’. 29 This position apparently enabled him personally to organize famine, establish a network of concentration camps and exercise control over Stalin in the 1930s. Moreover, Kaganovich was the agent for the historic revenge of the Khazars (a Turkic tribe in southern Russia that adopted Judaism in the eighth century) for their defeat by the Kievan Prince Sviatoslav over a thousand years ago: In the second phase of the annihilation of Russia, the Chernobyl’ ‘nuclear explosion’, prepared and carried out from the region where the descendant of the Khazar khans Kaganovich was born, as well as the coup carried out in Belovezhskaia Pushcha, symbolize revenge for the defeat of 965 and the second return of the Khazars to power in Russia . . .30

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Overall, Zhirinovskii’s levels of erudition, sophistication and argumentation are lamentable. Were it not for the fact that his party polled over 11 per cent in the most recent Duma elections, it might have been better, and kinder, to ignore him altogether. Making (non)sense of Stalin Stalin’s position as war-time leader makes him particularly interesting to nationalist historians and publicists. The problem for some writers of the religious/Black Hundred tendency is that, while Stalin led the USSR to victory in the Great Patriotic War (which they applaud), he claimed to be continuing the cause of Lenin and the October revolution (which they abhor). As for Soviet patriots, they are proud to claim Stalin as their own. However, they cannot now ignore revelations about the Stalin era that emerged under Khrushchev and, far more significantly, since glasnost’ and the opening of the archives. As we shall see, they deal with this by attempting to set Stalin ‘in context’. Making (non)sense of Stalin: religious nationalists Among the religious nationalists, Shafarevich seems least inclined to make allowances for Stalin. He resists the notion that the regime somehow changed its character in the 1930s or 1940s, and that Stalin was, or became, some kind of Russian patriot. He asks: ‘Was there any case in which Stalin acted in the interests of the Russian people when there were no other circumstances that obliged him to do so? I cannot think of any such cases. But he often went against the interests of the Russians.’31 For Shafarevich, anti-Russian internationalism and westernism predominated throughout the Soviet period. In this view of the Stalin era he is in a minority. Oleg Platonov, in contrast, sees a fundamental discontinuity in the 1930s. In his schema, Russia was in the grip of a ‘Jewish International’ for the first fifteen to twenty years of Bolshevik rule. However, in the late 1930s, Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov accomplished, albeit incompletely, a ‘national revolution’.32 Platonov seems to take a certain pleasure in the terror of the late 1930s, claiming ‘a large proportion of those repressed in 1937 and afterwards were indeed enemies of the Russian people’. He continues: ‘in destroying the Old Bolshevik guard, Stalin was not only dealing with his rivals in the struggle for power, but was to a certain extent expiating his own guilt before the Russian people, for whom the execution of the revolutionary pogromists was an act of historic retribution.’33 Platonov believes that the terror of the 1920s and early 1930s ‘had

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a mainly anti-Russian direction’, whereas from the mid-1930s it was ‘mainly an assault on anti-Russian, anti-state, cosmopolitan and subversive social elements—professional revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, agents of German intelligence . . . Masons . . . all the organizers of the genocide against the Russian people . . .’34 In other words, the main victims in the later phase were Jews. This presentation allows Platonov to describe the war and the partisan resistance to the Nazis in suitably glowing terms as ‘the heroic struggle of the Russian people against the German invasion’,35 in that the state ‘the Russian people’ were defending was somehow not the same as the one that existed for the first twenty years after 1917. One of the stranger contributors to the Russian nationalist press was the late Father Dmitrii Dudko, former priest-in-residence at Tomorrow newspaper. Twice imprisoned (under Stalin and Brezhnev), Dudko sought to defend Stalin as ‘Russia’s God-given leader’,36 crediting him with having ‘saved Orthodox churches from final destruction’ and ‘preserved the lives of important figures in the Orthodox Church, albeit not many’.37 Another Tomorrow writer, Aleksandr Sergeev, has explicitly argued the divine right of Stalin. Stalin came to power, believes Sergeev, through a mysterious, higher, supra-human, force . . . He believed that power was sacred, granted by God, and therefore is not to be exchanged for gold or oil, cannot be sold or given away to those who have no right to it. And when Russia was in imminent danger, he knew he had no right to be defeated. He had to be victorious and he was victorious, putting the ice-pick into the hand of Ramon Mercader, pushing back the occupying hordes from the West, creating a nuclear umbrella for Russia against the American barbarians who had reduced Hiroshima to ashes . . .38 Sergeev looks forward to the second coming of Stalin: ‘along with millions of people awaiting his coming, we repeat, like an incantation, he is close by, he is near, he will come.’39 Were it not for the fact that Tomorrow does not lampoon its own side, this article might be mistaken for a rather amusing parody. Making (non)sense of Stalin: Soviet patriots Among the Soviet patriots, enthusiasm for Stalin is almost invariably couched in terms of his ‘greatness’ as a historical figure. He is most

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commonly compared to Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. The injustices of his rule, where they cannot be denied or ignored, are presented as another facet of his historical greatness. Additionally, there is considerable reluctance among the Soviet patriots to admit that any of the problems subsequently faced by the USSR, which led to its eventual collapse, could have had their roots in the Stalin period. The overall story is one of a great inheritance squandered by unworthy successors. Another favourite theme is to present Stalin and his rule as the victim of a great campaign of malicious historical slander by the enemies of socialism or Russia, or both. In this way his apologists can claim to be ‘setting the record straight’. Vladimir Karpov, in his lengthy work about Stalin, Generalissimus, accepts that there were unjust repressions, torture and illegal executions. But they were all the work of Trotskyists! For Karpov, the terms ‘Trotskyist’, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’ seem to be more or less interchangeable. In his discussion of the collectivization process, Karpov produces the standard lists of Jewish surnames of secret police leaders at that time. He argues that the oppositionists were waging a widespread campaign to foment dissatisfaction among the peasants . . . the Trotskyists and Zionists . . . in order to embitter and poison the peoples against the Bolsheviks and especially against Stalin, repressed not only kulaks, but also middle and poor peasants . . .40 Karpov contrasts the roles of Stalin and the Trotskyists in the collectivization campaign: ‘On Stalin’s side, in his intentions and deeds, we see positive measures: the voluntary principle, explanation. Conversely, from the Trotskyists, we see negative, repressive actions, aimed at undermining and compromising collectivization, as they confirmed in full at the [Moscow show] trials . . .’41 These trials, the veracity of which Karpov does not doubt at all, were the high point of a ferocious campaign between 1936 and 1938 to eliminate ‘Trotskyists’, real or imagined, from all walks of Soviet life. Yet the very ferocity of the campaign demonstrates, to Karpov at least, a Trotskyist plot to discredit Stalin’s policies. ‘The purge of the party and army was necessary, and it was carried out by Stalin . . . But it cannot be denied that the Trotskyists and oppositionists got involved and . . . as so often before, carried it to absurd lengths, turning it into a real orgy of bloodshed . . .’ 42 Although much of Karpov’s book deals with war-time events, like most Stalin admirers he prefers to avoid discussing the deportations of

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entire peoples, such as the Chechens and Ingush or the Crimean Tatars. However, lengthy articles on the Za Stalina! website seek to explain and justify even this aspect of Stalin’s rule. An anonymous text explains the reasons for the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia in February 1944, using extensive archival materials to paint a picture of almost incessant banditry and lawlessness on the part of the Chechens from 1917 onwards, as well as mass collaboration with the German invaders. The basic argument is that, given their tradition of blood feuds and violence, brute force was the only language that Chechens respected. Stalin and Beria ‘understood the psycholog y of the mountain-dwellers’, and ‘the sound basis and justice of the decision to liquidate the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was recognized by the deportees themselves’.43 The writer claims that only 1,272 people died in transit, and concludes: ‘Looking at the current unending war in Chechnia, one can only once again respect the statesmanlike wisdom of Stalin, as well as his humaneness.’44 For all the valuable detail provided in this article, there is not one mention of Khaibakh, a Chechen village where, on 27 February 1944, 700 villagers who could not be transported on time were burned alive in a stable by NKVD (secret police) operatives. To his credit, Sergei KaraMurza does mention this event in passing as one of the ‘excesses, cruelties and crimes’45 that attended the deportations. Overall, however, Kara-Murza presents the mass deportations in a positive light. Expulsion for alleged collaboration with the enemy, while hard for everyone, saved the greater part of the men from death, and thereby saved the ethnos. If Chechens had been sentenced individually according to the laws of war-time, it would have been ethnocide; the loss of such a significant proportion of the young men would have undermined the demographic potential of the nation. Thanks to this archaic punishment the numbers of Chechens and Ingush increased by 14.2 per cent between 1944 and 1959 . . . They returned to the Caucasus as a mature and strengthened people.46 One of the most industrious producers of conspiracy theories among the Soviet patriots is Iurii Mukhin, who claims (for example) that ‘during the Second World War the Germans exterminated the Jews of the Soviet Union not on their own account, but at the instigation of the Zionists’.47 In his book The Murder of Stalin and Beria, Mukhin attempts to demonstrate

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that Khrushchev poisoned Stalin. The so-called ‘doctors’ plot’ of early 1953 (in which several doctors of Jewish origin were accused of plotting to kill Soviet leaders) was a diversion, orchestrated by Beria’s enemies in the security apparatus, to distract attention from the real plot.48 The motives of Khrushchev and his allies in the party nomenclature were, apparently, to thwart Stalin and Beria’s plans to transfer power from the party apparatus to the government structures. A peculiar feature of Mukhin’s writing is his liberal use of the word zhid—normally a derogatory term for ‘Jew’—to denote all those he does not like, whatever their religious or national origins. All Khrushchev’s men qualify as zhidy. The succession to Stalin is an important question for the Soviet patriots, who all passionately loathe Khrushchev. How was it possible that a leader of Stalin’s qualities could be followed by such unworthy successors? Writing in Tomorrow, Viktor Dobrov does not accept Mukhin’s assertion that Stalin was murdered, if only because ‘Stalin was a living “god”, and fear and veneration of him were in the blood, in the genes of every member of the leadership’.49 But such veneration did not extend to all of Stalin’s personnel. Dobrov’s theory is that Stalin intended P. K. Ponomarenko (1902–84) to replace him as head of the government, and that Ponomarenko would have been a worthy successor. The problems of succession were not the fault of Stalin or the system he bequeathed, but of the unprincipled machinations of those Stalin had sought to remove from power. Conspiracy theory provides the easiest explanation for the supposed degeneration of the Soviet system after Stalin, in that no blame attaches to Stalin himself. Conclusion There is little unanimity among Russian nationalist historians and writers. Some praise Tsarism, others condemn it, some praise Bolshevism, others condemn it, some blame the Masons, others the Jews, many both; and one or two even see the Great Russians themselves as bearing some responsibility for the events of the twentieth century. It is, however, possible to identify some common themes and approaches. First, little or no attention is paid to economic factors in these writers’ accounts of events. All tend very much to concentrate on politics. The revolution and civil war in particular are presented almost entirely in terms of the political machinations of various groups. Second, there is a strong tendency to resort to conspiracy theories. Not only politically organized groups like the Masons, but entire national or religious groups (particularly the Jews) are assumed to be operating in

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a co-ordinated fashion; furthermore, the interests and activities of these groups are necessarily consciously ‘anti-Russian’. It is therefore sufficient to show, or allege, that someone was a member of a Masonic lodge, or that he or she had a non-Russian surname, in order to cast suspicion on that person’s actions or motives. Third, the term ‘Russian’ (russkii rather than rossiiskii) is rarely clearly defined, but generally refers either to someone Orthodox, or of Orthodox origin. Ukrainians and Belorussians can therefore, when convenient, be classed as ‘Russians’, whereas large swathes of the population of Russia, many of whom had Russian as their main or only language, cannot. Fourth, a sense of victimhood is a powerful component of nationalist mythology. Russia and the Russians are continually presented as the (almost) blameless victims of diverse malevolent forces: Jewish-Masonic conspirators, the West, international bankers and so forth. Russians may be the authors of their own successes, but rarely of their own misfortunes. Finally, not one of the authors considered makes any attempt to understand or sympathize with other national groups within the Russian empire. Their nationalism or national pride, if mentioned at all, is invariably presented as something illegitimate, fomented by those ever-present, malevolent, anti-Russian, forces. Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

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Iu. I. Kiryanov (comp.), Pravye partii: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1998), 596, 71. O. A. Platonov, Istoriia russkogo naroda v XX veke (Moscow, 1997), vol. 4, part 1, ch. 49, available at http://lib.ru/PLATONOWO/russ2.txt (viewed 19 May 2004). Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Russian are by the author. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., ch. 51. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., ch. 49. I. R. Shafarevich, ‘Zachem nam seichas ob etom dumat’?’, Zavtra, no. 29, 1999, available at http://zavtra.ru/cgi//veil//data/zavtra/99/294/51.html (all webpages cited viewed 14 October 2003, unless dated otherwise). I. R. Shafarevich, Trekhtysiacheletniaia zagadka (Moscow, 2002), ch. 11, available at http://shafarevich.voskres.ru/13.htm. V. Kozhinov, Chernosotensy’ i Revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1998), available at http:// kozhinov.voskres.ru/oglavl.htm. Ibid., ch. 6, at http://kozhinov.voskres.ru/cher-sot/6.html.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. S. G. Kara-Murza, Sovetskaia tsivilizatsiia (Moscow, 2001), vol. 1, ch. 4, available at www.kprf.ru/kara-murza/2934.shtml. Ibid., ch. 5. Ibid. Ibid. See S. G. Kara-Murza, Evrei, dissidenty, evrokommunisty (Moscow, 2002), available at www.kara-murza.ru/books/evrei/evrei_content.htm. Ibid., ch. 11, available at www.kara-murza.ru/books/evrei/evrei11.htm. Ibid. V. Zhirinovskii, Vragi Rossii (Moscow, 2000), available at www.ldpr.ru/Books/ abc_text/vragi_rossii.htm. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 198. Shafarevich, ‘Zachem nam seichas ob etom dumat’?’. Oleg Platonov, Ternovyy venets Rossii: Istoriia russkogo naroda v XX veke (Moscow, 1997), vol. 2, ch. 1, available at http://lib.ru/PLATONOWO/russ3.txt (viewed 19 May 2004). Ibid. Ibid., ch. 2. Ibid., ch. 17. Dmitrii Dudko, ‘On byl veruiushchim’, Nash sovremennik, no. 12, 1999, available at www.stalinism.narod.ru/dudko_2.htm. Ibid. Aleksandr Sergeev, ‘Misticheskii stalinizm’, Zavtra, no. 44, 1999, available at http://zavtra.ru/cgi/veil/data/zavtra/99/309/52.html. Ibid. V. Karpov, Generalissimus (Moscow, 2002), available at www.patriotica.ru/ history/karpov_gener.html (viewed 19 May 2004). Ibid. Ibid. Chechentsy i Ingushi, at http://stalinism.narod.ru/narod/chechen.htm. Ibid. Kara-Murza, Sovetskaia tsivilizatsiia, vol. 1, ch. 13, available at www.kprf.ru/ kara-murza/2935.shtml. Ibid. Iu. Mukhin, ‘Sionizm i sovetskie evrei’, Duel’, no. 33, 2003, available at www.duel.ru/200333/?33_1_2. See Iu. Mukhin, Ubiistvo Stalina i Beriia (Moscow, 2002), available at www.patriotica.ru/history/muhin_murder.html. V. Dobrov, ‘Stalin rastil sebe smenu’, Zavtra, no. 12, 2003, available at http:// zavtra.ru/cgi/veil//data/zavtra/03/487/61.html.

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HOLY RUSSIA VERSUS THE FALLEN WORLD Conservative Orthodox Mythologies in Contemporary Russia Alexander Verkhovsky

This paper addresses the mythologies constructed and disseminated in both marginal and mainstream media by conservatives within the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), focusing primarily on the myth of ‘Holy Russia’. ‘Conservatives’, in this context, refers to a broad spectrum of believers who oppose the moral and ideological stance of liberalism. Conservatism is to be found among the militant anti-liberal organizations and individual activists generally referred to as religious nationalists, Orthodox monarchists, fundamentalists, ultra-conservatives and so forth, whom we shall call ‘Russian Orthodox nationalists’.1 Moreover, the ideologically self-determined ‘centre’ of the ROC, the church leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate, should also be numbered among the conservatives. The statements of Patriarch Aleksii II and Metropolitan Kirill (Gundiaev)—chairman of the Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations and a significant figure in the ROC hierarchy—together with the major document ‘The Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church’ adopted by the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000, reflect the general mood of conservatism prevalent within the ROC. Of course, one must be careful to distinguish the Patriarch’s position from those militant nationalist and monarchist groups at the far end of the conservative spectrum, and the mythologies of the centrists and the Orthodox nationalists will be compared and contrasted throughout this discussion. It should also be noted that successful manipulation of the media has been a distinguishing feature of Orthodox nationalists. Their efficient

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use of traditional print media, television, radio and the newer technology of the Internet has meant that these groups have tended to ‘punch above their weight’, wielding influence disproportionate to their numerical strength. The centrists, while making great efforts recently to redress this imbalance, still have difficulty conveying the ‘official line’ in the face of Orthodox nationalist propaganda. As we shall see, however, the two perspectives often overlap, and a common conservative mythology can be observed in the image of Holy Russia pitted against an apostate world. Holy Russia and the Second Coming It should first be noted that not even the most deeply engaged Russian nationalist considers contemporary Russia as ‘Holy Russia’. Those who use this phrase do not mean the real Russia, but its idealized image, realized to varying degrees at various times. ‘Holy Russia’ may, however, be found acting today as a spiritual force within a particular social structure or a particular social movement. Most frequently, the Orthodox Church, or a ‘purified’ Russian Orthodox Church, is imagined as that inspired structure. The real Russia belongs to ‘the fallen world’, because the entire world is fallen and riddled with apostasy. As Professor Aleksandr Kazin of Saint Petersburg University puts it, using the image of the legendary city of Kitezh that submerged itself beneath the lake in the face of Tatar persecution: ‘Engulfed from all sides by waves of apostasy, Holy Russia has gone into the depths, but secretly continues to live in Christ.’2 On the level of political discourse, however, it is impossible to reason in these mystical terms. One has to define at least approximately where the opposing parties are, geographically and ideologically. In political terms, the issue is the confrontation between a thoroughly real Russia and its supposed enemies, predominantly situated in the West. However, political terms do not fully eclipse mystical ones in the Orthodox and nationalist media, and this overlap results in the creation of mythological schema. Here we use the term ‘mythological’ not as a value judgement, but as a synonym for a non-rational understanding of the world and one’s place within it. The tide of global apostasy should, in principle, be opposed not by a country, but by a church. One might assume that this should be the united body of the Eastern Orthodox churches, but within the ROC there is a rather dismissive attitude towards other Orthodox Christian peoples, in part because of the contentious issue of sacred time. When Metropolitan Vladimir (Kotliarov), for example, publicly indicated his support for the Gregorian calendar used by other churches, the Patriarch himself wrote

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that ‘we should bow deeply before our believers for their heroic deed [in preserving the Julian calendar] and support them in a fatherly way, rather than show them Arabs, Greeks or Romanians as an example . . .’3 Archimandrite Amvrosii (Iurasov), confessor to the conservative Radonezh society and Father Superior of the Sviato-Danilovskii monastery in Ivanovo, concluded that ‘we have only four churches left which retain faith in the true God: those are the churches of Jerusalem, Serbia, Georgia and our Russia’,4 since only the latter four retain the Julian calendar. The former chairman of the Publishing Council of the Moscow Patriarchate and current Archbishop of Novosibirsk and Berdsk, Bishop Tikhon (Emel’ianov), expressed himself even more categorically: ‘In the world, perhaps, there is only one church left—the real preserver of Orthodoxy—the Russian Orthodox Church.’ 5 Generally speaking, the ROC sees itself as a lone giant with small and doubtful allies, and maintains an unconditionally friendly attitude towards only the Serbian Orthodox Church, which is nonetheless perceived as a weaker sibling in need of protection, rather than as a supportive equal. The Russian Orthodox Church is not a church of Orthodox Russians in terms of either ethnic origin or citizenship, and there is no such identification made in ‘The Bases of the Social Concept’, which sets forth the official ROC position on church relations with state and society. This document contains the foundations for an identification of another kind however: ‘When a nation, civil or ethnic, represents fully or predominantly a mono-confessional Orthodox community, it can in a certain sense be regarded as a single community of faith—an Orthodox nation.’ 6 On the basis of the (controversial) statistic that 80 per cent of Russia’s citizens identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, ROC leaders deduce that Russia ‘can be regarded as a single community of faith—an Orthodox nation’. In the past, ROC leaders have repeated the official government line about the multi-confessional nature of Russia. The situation has changed since late 2002, when Metropolitan Kirill declared in the newspaper Radonezh: ‘We must forget altogether that widely-used term “a multi-confessional country”: Russia is an Orthodox country with ethnic and religious minorities.’7 Orthodox nationalists certainly encounter no problems identifying themselves entirely with Russia, and indeed consider Belarus and Ukraine as parts of the one Orthodox nation that have separated from Russia as a result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. That said, in contrast to the Patriarchate, which differentiates (at least in theory) ethnic identity from religious, 8 Orthodox nationalists often mix these two identities. Any

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Orthodox nationalist would agree with Archimandrite Pankratii (Zherdev), the Father Superior of the Valaam Spaso-Preobrazhenskii monastery (hardly a marginal person), who said: Orthodoxy has gone so deep into the life of the Russian people, has become its soul, flesh and blood, that ‘Russian’ and ‘Orthodox’ have become synonyms. It is impossible to talk about a Russian man, if he is not Orthodox. ‘A Russian Baptist’—that is perceived now as something alien, something perverse.9 This perception that Russia and its church are isolated in the world is aggravated among many Orthodox Christians by apocalyptic sentiments, by the notion that we are living in ‘the last times’, the times of apostasy, and that the Antichrist’s arrival is looming and every occurrence in public and religious life relates to this imminent event. Compilations of apocalyptic prophesies by (or attributed to) numerous Orthodox persons of authority are surprisingly popular. 10 This phenomenon has become so widespread that even within the Orthodox nationalist community critical articles are written about it.11 Of course, there is also criticism from the Patriarchate, which maintains a sober attitude towards apocalyptic topics. The majority of Orthodox nationalists, represented in publications such as the newspapers Radonezh, Black Hundred (Chernaia sotnia), Orthodox Rus (Rus’ pravoslavnaia), the magazine Russian House (Russkii dom), and the Russkaia liniia website, adhere to tradition and confine themselves to indefinite rhetoric that implies that the coming of the Antichrist is near but the exact time is unknown. Nevertheless, there is a very active minority convinced that ‘the time’ has essentially come. The most prominent figure is Archpriest Aleksandr Shargunov, who has been publishing the almanac The Antichrist in Moscow (Antikhrist v Moskve) since the mid1990s. Father Aleksandr imagines the end of the world in quite concrete terms: The coming of the Antichrist will be sudden. The disintegration of life in all spheres—financial and economic crisis, the decline of morals—will reach its culmination. Within one hour the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the Universal Union of Churches, the UN and other similar organizations will sign a treaty recognizing the supreme power of a new dictator, whom

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everybody will hail as the only and last hope of mankind. . . . For us it is hard to believe that the present generation will live to see that. But all of us will be granted the vision of the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.12 Significant military and political developments (the war in Kosovo, the Palestinian Intifada, 11 September) have unsurprisingly provoked some even shorter-term forecasts.13 The most serious arguments in favour of the looming Apocalypse were provided by reports about the satanic nature of the bar-code on goods and the individual taxpayer’s number (the Russian acronym for which is INN). Quotations from the Revelation of Saint John are recognized immediately and without additional complex explanations in the electronic codes and implanted microchips, and the number 666 and similar signs are seen everywhere. The most persistent fighters against bar-codes and INN are therefore generally the most overt prophets of doomsday. Conservative Orthodox ideologues perceive relations between the Church and ‘the fallen world’ in terms of the defence of the former against the aggression of the latter. The higher the heat of apocalyptic expectations, the greater the status of that battle, and the more pessimistic their attitudes towards its outcome. Within the Patriarchate there is also fear of the global evil attacking Orthodox Russia, and Orthodox nationalists like to recall the Patriarch’s own words about the current battle: Today these are not sporadic manifestations of sin, not isolated episodes of evil and vicious destructive actions, but the accelerated building of a world-wide system of evil.14 We must become aware that a well-planned bloodless war is being waged against our people with the aim of destroying it . . . We do not see anybody except the Church earnestly countering that deadly threat.15 Yet, the Patriarch is inclined to believe that Russia has the resources for ‘a counter-offensive’: ‘Russian cultural tradition . . . may be required more than once by both the West and the whole world, those living through an acute spiritual, economic and ecological crisis. It is necessary for us only to preserve that tradition.’16 Amongst Orthodox nationalists, however, there are very few people ready to share his optimism.

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Globalization of the enemy Russian nationalists long ago decided that the main enemies of Russian Orthodoxy were the West and the Jews. It is significant that these traditional enemies are perceived as part of a global offensive against Holy Russia. For example, the myth that Jews are planning the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem as a throne for the Antichrist has become almost universally accepted among Orthodox nationalists.17 No Orthodox nationalists perceive the confrontation with the West as a solely political one. According to Vladimir Semenko, a member of the Executive Committee of the Union of Orthodox Citizens: the crisis of contemporary civilization on a world-wide scale is directly linked to the fact that apostasy-ridden western civilization (essentially post-Christian, [and only] genetically related to Christianity) at present proliferates its metastases throughout the world, claiming the role of the sole universal world project. . . . The divergence of Western and Eastern Christianity is the start of the conflict between the apostasy-ridden civilization (which is preparing for the advent of the Antichrist) and the ‘preserving’ civilization (which is preventing it). Ultimately, both are focused on the Second Coming, but in the first case that Coming will be the pinnacle of [their] rejection of God.18 Any cultural or political conflict is presented as simply an aspect of the struggle against the main enemy: the Antichrist. Accordingly, Orthodox nationalists do not perceive a need for restraint in their anti-western declarations. It has often been pointed out that Orthodox nationalists are focused on the idea of enemies. 19 In recent years Orthodox nationalists have been preoccupied by the need to fit Islam into their ‘system of enemies’,20 and the theme of globalization has offered a real intellectual gift to those engaged in the construction of this system. Among Orthodox nationalists, globalization is currently perceived as the main weapon of the Antichrist, its universal nature an indication that ‘the end times’ do indeed draw near. The issue of globalization impacted on the Russian Orthodox Church together with the concern about electronic bar-codes, which were first identified in Greece, then in Ukraine and finally in Russia as indicators of the Apocalyse. From protests against bar-codes on consumer goods and INN, Orthodox nationalists turned to actions against globalization in general but, while only a small (though very active) minority of Orthodox

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nationalists remained faithful to the struggle against INN, anti-globalization has become an important ideological tenet for almost the whole church.21 Generally speaking, Orthodox conservative centrists are less interested in the threat posed by bar-codes and other technological innovations than their radical nationalist co-religionists, but they also have no doubt about the evil nature of globalization. Why should they doubt it, when the Patriarch himself talks about ‘the world system of evil’ (see above), and when ‘The Bases of the Social Concept’ hints at the similarity between globalization and the construction of the Tower of Babel? The position of moderate Orthodox anti-globalization was formulated at the conference, ‘The Spiritual and Social Problems of Globalization’, held in May 2001 at the Saint Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy: The ideology of globalization is in opposition to the Christian world outlook and incompatible with it . . . Globalization is becoming the embodiment of the utopian idea of mondialism—the creation of a unitary, supranational and rigidly controlled community on Earth . . . The Russian Orthodox Church and the state have become the main obstacles on the path of [these] aspirations to world domination . . .22 Again, Holy Russia is presented as the only barrier to the march of the Antichrist. Significantly, the above-quoted document of an official conference provoked no response from church leaders. Metropolitan Kirill’s battle with global secularism The official position of the Church, although inclined towards such a perception of world events, is, however, based on different assumptions formulated by Metropolitan Kirill in early 2000.23 The contemporary views of Metropolitan Kirill, which differ markedly from his own statements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, have been aptly summarized by Konstantin Kostiuk.24 According to Kostiuk, Metropolitan Kirill views secularism— presently embodied in liberalism—as the main enemy of the Church. Metropolitan Kirill, who often spoke in favour of personal freedom in the early 1990s, now prefers to talk about the necessity of restricting the ‘egotistic freedom’ on which secular liberalism is based. As expressed in the final paragraph of ‘The Bases of the Social Concept’, written under the guidance of Metropolitan Kirill: the Church cannot favour a world order that puts the human personality, darkened by sin, at the centre of everything . . . the Church

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seeks to assert Christian values in the process of decision-making on the most important public issues both on national and international levels. She strives for recognition of the legality of a religious worldview as a basis for socially significant action (including those [actions] taken by the state) . . .25 Recognizing the ‘legality of a religious worldview’ would, according to Metropolitan Kirill, legitimate a traditional social order based on such a religious outlook and oppose, naturally, the liberal standards that now dominate the European arena of social and political action. It should be noted, however, that there is no clear support for Orthodox monarchism from the Patriarchate, and Metropolitan Kirill generally does not call for a return to the ancien régime of the Romanov Tsars (as Orthodox nationalists generally do). Neither does Metropolitan Kirill urge the complete uprooting of liberalism. Rather he calls for a rejection of the (apparent) universality of a liberal legal system, established by Western European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His alternative system, proposed at the inaugural meeting of the European Council of Religious Leaders, is a less than convincing cultural and legal pluralism: Historical experience demonstrates convincingly that a society with many cultures and religions, but which is built on the basis of the monopoly of a single cultural project, is not viable. . . . Certainly, no one is saying that we should abandon liberal values, which have been brought into the culture and legal systems of many countries. Yet I think that liberal standards should be supplemented with other cultural and philosophical systems and all of them should be brought into harmony. Moreover, it should be done not on the level of declarations about friendship and mutual respect, but on the level of the reformation of legal and global governance. It is necessary to recognize the equality of different models of culture and philosophies of life. 26 It is doubtful whether ROC leaders truly envisage legal pluralism operating within the frameworks of one country (the legal pluralism of early barbarian kingdoms would possibly be the closest analogy), and this is more likely an attempt to undermine the precarious foundations of a western world-outlook in Russia. Anti-secularism, as the main theoretical premise of the ROC leaders, has generated its own version of ‘the clash of civilizations’ theory.

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Metropolitan Kirill talks about different civilizations, one of which—the western—is detached from its religious tradition and has become secularliberal, while the others continue to adhere to religious traditions.27 The influence of western civilization on other civilizations is evaluated as predominantly negative and even more dangerous than the recent Communist atheism.28 Thus the position of church leaders is consistently anti-western. It is, of course, free from the extremes of Orthodox nationalist rhetoric, but is essentially the same in stating the opposition of Orthodox Russia (and its allies) to the apostasy-engulfed West. It should be noted, however, that anti-westernism is not an inevitable consequence of an Orthodox view of world problems. Indeed, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, sees no fundamental difference between Western and Eastern Europe.29 The practical application of the ROC’s anti-westernism may not be as balanced and moderate as it appears in official documents. More radical Orthodox anti-westernists, with the exception of a relatively narrow circle of consistent intra-church dissidents, are from time to time offered symbolic support by the Patriarchate. On 16 October 2002, for example, the Patriarch congratulated the magazine and television programme Russian House on their anniversary, 30 and on 19 September 2003 Metropolitan Kirill bestowed the Church Order of Saint Innokentii on the Chairman of the Union of Orthodox Citizens, Valentin Lebedev.31 The Patriarchate itself in its extra-church activities continually cooperates with overtly anti-liberal and anti-western forces. In the realm of politics, these include the followers of Gennadii Raikov (People’s Party) and Sergei Glaz’ev (Motherland bloc), but also the whole spectrum of moderate Russian nationalists (which can be seen annually at the sessions of the All-World Russian People’s Congress). In the foreign policy realm, the theories of Metropolitan Kirill are sometimes reflected in rather shady anti-western alliances. A recent example of this is the forum Dialogue of Civilizations, which took place on 3–6 September 2003 on Rhodes. The Patriarch blessed this forum, and the official Russian delegation—headed by the Chairman of the Holy Synod’s missionary department, the Archbishop of Belgorod and Staryi Oskol’ Ioann (Popov)—happily collaborated with such radical figures as the Islamist Geidar Dzhemal’ and the extreme Orthodox nationalist Mikhail Nazarov, as well as Halil Rizka, a representative of Hizbullah from Beirut.32 In contrast to the ‘centrist’ leaders of the ROC, who despite reservations continue to participate in forums such as the World Council of Churches and the European Council of Religious Leaders, Orthodox nationalists simply do not consider it possible to negotiate with the West.

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On rare occasions an alternative approach—to find allies, ‘a fifth column’ within the West—is mooted. In a spring 2003 issue of the newspaper Radonezh, for example, it was proposed that negotiations should be held not with the leaders of the New World Order, but with their ultraconservative opponents: those connected with the journal Orthodox England; the confederate movement in the United States, including the journal Southern Partisan; and the followers of the French Archbishop Lefebvre, who oppose the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.33 The actions of pessimists and optimists An important difference has already been noted above between the worldperception of the Orthodox nationalists and that of church leaders: the former consider the situation in the country and the world extremely pessimistically, while the latter remain cautiously optimistic about Russia’s ability to survive, and indeed even resist, the reign of the Antichrist. Accordingly, Orthodox nationalists—especially radical nationalists— prioritize the protection of the purity of principles over the achievement of real results. The Moscow Patriarchate takes quite a different approach and, in 2002, actively engaged in several public initiatives within Russia. Public relations campaigns were launched to enlarge the Church’s access to the mass media and to promote the further restitution of church lands confiscated during the Soviet period. The ROC also continued its policy of restricting the activities of other believers, primarily Roman Catholics, and a serious attempt was made to introduce Orthodox teaching into state schools. Although in this latter case there has been limited success to date, one can safely predict that the promotion of Orthodoxy within schools will continue. 34 Seen in a wider context, however, the activities of the ROC in the West—primarily in Europe—are more significant. The ROC, together with other European churches, participated in discussions about the future European Constitution. The various demands from Christian churches for the most part coincided: to include a mention of God and the historical role of Christianity in the preamble to the Constitution; and to preserve the existing variety of national legislations in the fields of church–state relations and moral issues. But the ROC representatives also diverged from their European colleagues in that they based their demands not only on the Christian commandments, but also on the aforementioned ideological platform of Metropolitan Kirill. It was because of this, in particular, that ROC representatives insisted on the voices of the churches being heard separately, rather than jointly, during discussions.

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In October 2002 the Department of External Church Relations issued a statement in which the position of the ROC towards the draft European Constitution was laid out in great detail.35 It was based on the same protest against ‘the monopoly of liberalism’, but the arguments were adapted specifically for a liberal and even left-liberal western audience, although those afraid of ‘Islamic expansion’ were also not forgotten. First, the text addressed not only inter-civilization contradictions, but also the internal pluralism of western society. Second, it appealed to the concept of group rights as a counterweight to individual rights. Third, the question (which is particularly important for the ROC) of the so-called ‘destructive cults’—new religious movements—was unobtrusively linked to the activities of Islam in Europe. Metropolitan Kirill enters into a polemic with the West on its own terms, referring to western liberal concepts of pluralism and multiculturalism, but interpreting them in an anti-liberal spirit. This has manifested itself also in arguments in favour of the ancient ban on women entering the territory of Mount Athos. The European Parliament threatens to encroach upon the male-only status of Athos out of consideration for the principle of non-discrimination, while Metropolitan Kirill opposes this encroachment not from the position of Orthodoxy, but from the position of democracy: the religious tradition of a country belonging to the European Union is outraged, while the established standard is clear and indisputable to the majority of citizens of this country. Why is the minority, which does not understand this standard, given the possibility to impose its viewpoint on the majority through the EU’s mechanisms of governance?36 Arguably, the problem of the status of Athos could be solved by strengthening the rights of religious associations (in this case, the right to preserve the private nature of their property), but such a solution would be based on the principle of liberal respect for religious pluralism, and is therefore unappealing to the ROC. The problem of Athos is therefore summarized by Metropolitan Kirill as the more palatable ‘democratic right’ of an apparent Orthodox majority to reject liberal norms. It seems likely that this diplomatic approach by Metropolitan Kirill will enjoy some measure of success. Postscript Both Orthodox nationalists and the leaders of the ROC perceive their social mission as the struggle of Orthodox Russia against the liberal West,

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long ago fallen into apostasy and now polluting the whole world. Of course, this general perception does not rule out numerous dissenting voices, a few of which have been noted in this paper. The principal difference between the Orthodox nationalists and the ROC leaders, in terms of the struggle against the apostate West, is that the former believe themselves already engaged in the struggle against the Antichrist, and hope only to hold out for as long as possible before perishing honourably. The latter, however, see the struggle against western apostasy as a long-term campaign in which it is difficult, yet possible, to be victorious. Nevertheless, in recent years the pronouncements and actions of the Moscow Patriarchate and the majority of Orthodox nationalists have become increasingly similar. The ideological transformation of Metropolitan Kirill—who has become more conservative over the years—has been outlined above. Some Orthodox nationalists have also undergone the reverse transformation. Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), for example, abbot of the influential Sretenskii monastery in Moscow, has moved from an overtly fundamentalist position (as a campaigner against the demonic INN, for example) to a more moderate position. However, pragmatism is not always effective in politics. In the 2003 elections, the Moscow Patriarchate had a public stake in the moderate and respectable People’s Party (Narodnaia partiia), since the Patriarch’s own advisor Nikolai Derzhavin appeared in third place on the party list. The People’s Party failed miserably in the elections, but the Motherland bloc (Rodina)—closely linked to the nationalist Union of Orthodox Citizens— did exceptionally well. This result brought the Patriarchate and the Orthodox nationalists even closer together, and this consolidation is likely to increase the political effectiveness of Orthodox conservatives within government and without. While it is difficult to predict how effective government-level penetration of Orthodox conservative nationalism will be in the ‘struggle against the Antichrist’, one can surmise that this consolidation will significantly impact upon the ideology and practice of Russian politics in the coming years. Notes 1 2 3

Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Politicheskoe pravoslavie: Russkie pravoslavnye natsionalisty i fundamentalisty, 1995–2001 gg. (Moscow, 2003). ‘Ogon’ r usskoi zhizni. Beseda s professorom SpbGU A.L.Kazinym’, Pravoslavnyi Sankt-Peterburg, no. 12 (90), 1999. Unless otherwise stated, translations from the Russian are by the author. ‘Poslanie Patriarkha mitr. Vladimiru (Kotliarovu)’, Russkii vestnik, no. 5, 1997.

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Aleksandra Kolymagina and Boris Kolymagin, ‘Razdelat’sia so vsemi’, NGReligii, 23 February 2000. Evgenii Komarov, ‘Krest na sovesti’, Novye izvestiia, 13 August 1998. ‘The bases of the social concept of the Russian Orthodox Church’, 2000, available in English on the ROC website at www.orthodox.org.ru/sd00e.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Mitropolit Kirill: “Rossiia—pravoslavnaia, a ne ‘mnogokonfessional’naia’ strana”’, Radonezh, no. 8, 2002. ‘The bases of the social concept’. ‘“Glavnoe—sokhraniat’ paiat’ Bozhiiu”. Beseda s arkhimandritom Valaamskogo Spaso-Preobrazhenskogo monastyria Pankratiem’, Russkoe voskresenie, 2 October 2001, available at www.voskres.ru/interview/opankr.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). Sergei Fomin (ed.), Rossiia pered vtorym prishestviem (Sviato-Troitskaia Sergieva Lavra, 1993). Sviashchennik Petr Andrievskii, ‘Rossiia pered vtorym prishestviem . . .’, Blagodatnyi ogon’, no. 7, 2001. Protoierei Aleksandr Shargunov, ‘Chetyre zashchity protiv “novogo mirovogo poriadka”’, Russkii dom, no. 12, 2000. Leonid Simonovich, ‘Sviashchennaia voina: Zaiavlenie soiuza pravoslavnykh khorugvenostsev’, available on the SPKh website at www.pycckie.com/ simonovich/10.htm (viewed 27 March 2004); P. Vasil’ev, ‘Ot goriashchego Pentagona—k Stene placha’, Russkii vestnik, no. 37, 2001. ‘Iz vystupleniia Sviateishego Patriarkha Aleksiia II na ezhegodnom eparkhial’nom sobranii 23.12.98’, Russkii vestnik, nos 1–2, 1999. ‘Vystuplenie Patriarkha Aleksiia II na moskovskom eparkhial’nom sobranii’, available on the ROC website at www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru/ nr012151.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘“Ia veriu v nash narod”: Interv’iu Sviateishego Patriarkha Moskovskogo i vseia Rusi Aleksiia II’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 17 February 1999. ‘O evreiakh, Tret’em Khrame i novoi kartine mira. Beseda glavnogo redaktora “Russkoi linii” Sergeia Grigor’eva s redaktorom otdela politiki Anatoliem Stepanovym’, 20 March 2002, available on the Russkaia liniia website at www.rusk.ru/News/02/3/new20_03a.htm (viewed 27 March 2004); Russkii dom, television programme broadcast 8 November 2001, quoted in ‘Kto initsiator mezhdunarodnogo terrorizma?’, Russkii vestnik, 19 November 2001. Vladimir Semenko, ‘Metafizika apostasii: o dukhovno-metafizicheskikh istokakh krizisa sovremennoi tsivilizatsii’, Evraziiskii vestnik, no. 14, 2002, available at www.e-journal.ru/p_relig-st1-14.html (viewed 27 March 2004). Mikhail Zavalov, ‘Pravoslavie v kol’tse vragov’, Religiia v Rossii, 12 April 2002, available at http://religion.russ.ru/discussions/20020412-zavalov.html (viewed 27 March 2004); Stella Rock, ‘“Militant piety”: fundamentalist tendencies in the Russian Orthodox Brotherhood movement’, Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 22, no. 3, 2002, 14. Alexander Verkhovsky, ‘Who is the enemy now? Islamophobia and antisemitism among Russian Orthodox nationalists before and after September 11’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 38, no. 2, June 2004, 127–43. Alexander Verkhovsky, ‘Radical Orthodox anti-globalism in 1999–2002’, available

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on the SOVA Center website at http://religion.sova-center.ru/publications/ 194EF5E/1951122 (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Itogovyi dokument nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii “Dukhovnye i sotsial’nye problemy globalizatsii”. Saint Petersburg, 3–4 May 2001’, available on the ‘Stoianie za istiny’ website at www.zaistinu.ru/old/econtrol/INN/ winn09.shtml (viewed 24 August 2005). Metropolit Smolenskii Kaliningradskii Kirill, ‘Norma very kak norma zhizni’, in Bogoslovskaia konferentsiia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi. Pravoslavnoe bogoslovie na poroge tret’ego tysiacheletiia. Moskva, 7–9 February 2000. Materialy (Moscow, 2000), 169–85. Konstantin Kostiuk, ‘Tri portreta’, Kontinent, no. 113, 2002, 252–86. ‘The bases of the social concept’. ‘“International integration and civilizational diversity of humanity”. An address by Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, at the inaugural meeting of the European Council of Religious Leaders (Oslo, Norway, 11–12 November 2002)’, available at the ROC website at www.russianorthodox-church.org.ru/ne211123.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). Ibid. Mitropolit Kirill, ‘Filermskaia ikona Bozhiei Materi i sovremennye vyzovy khristianstvu’, available at the ROC website at www.russian-orthodoxchurch.org.ru/nr112171.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). Ioan Horga and Mircea Brie, ‘Religion in the context of secularization and globalization’, in Maria Marczewska-Rytko (ed.), Religion in a Changing Europe. Between Pluralism and Fundamentalism. Selected Problems (Lublin, 2003), 30–2. ‘Glava RPTs MP pozdravil zhurnal i teleprogrammu “Russkii dom” s dvoinym iubileem’, 17 October 2002, available on the Credo website at http://portalcredo.ru/site/?act=news&id=3759&cf= (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Predsedatel’ SPG Valentin Lebedev nagrazhden ordenom sv. Innokentiia’, 21 September 2003, available on the Radonezh website at www.radonezh.ru/ new/?ID=672 (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Dialog tsivilizatsii’ na Rodose’, 16 December 2003, available on the SOVA Center website at http://neocon.sova-center.ru/25F21B4/28F837B/2C6C19C (viewed 27 March 2004). Ierodiakon Makarii, ‘Ne oboznat’siia v gustoi t’me’, Radonezh, no. 3, 2003. Aleksandr Verkhovskii, ‘Bespokoinoe sosedstvo. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ i putinskoe gosudarstvo’, in A. Verkhovskii, E. Mikhailovskaia and V. Pribylovskii, Rossiia Putina. Pristrastniy vzglyad (Moscow, 2003), 100–29; Filipp Shchipkov, ‘Diskussiia o prepodavanii osnov pravoslavnoi kultury v obshcheobrazovatel’noi shkole’, Religiia i SMI, 17 July 2003, available at www.religare.ru/article5980.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Zaiavlenie v sviazi s rabotoi konventa “Budushchee Evropy”’, available at the ROC website at www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru/nr210074.htm (viewed 27 March 2004). ‘Metropolitan Kirill sends an open letter to Valery Giscard D’Estaing, Chairman of the Convention on the Future of Europe Presidium’, available at the ROC website at www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru/ne302143.htm (viewed 27 March 2004).

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THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION AND THE MYTH OF A JEWISH CONSPIRACY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA Michael Hagemeister

Over one hundred years ago, in August–September 1903, a series of articles appeared in an obscure, extreme right-wing St Petersburg newspaper under the title ‘A Programme for World Conquest by the Jews’.1 The newspaper went out of business shortly thereafter, and only a handful of libraries hold issues of it, but this text was subsequently transformed into the most infamous anti-Jewish pamphlet of the twentieth century, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fictitious document that purports to reveal a Jewish-Masonic conspiratorial plan to achieve world domination and to establish a global, totalitarian welfare state. The forgery, based largely on a compilation of literary materials from the second half of the nineteenth century, was probably concocted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the most intensive research, the details of its origins still defy clarification and the question of its authorship remains open.2 It was not, however, this first version from the St Petersburg newspaper that became so widely known after the First World War and the Russian revolution, but a version that appeared two years later. This subsequent version is connected with the name of Sergei Nilus, who included the text in his devotional book The Great in the Small and the Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility: Notes of an Orthodox Believer. 3 Although Nilus is the editor of The Protocols rather than its author, his identity plays an important role in its reception in post-Soviet Russia. In secondary literature

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Nilus is often characterized as a shadowy and enigmatic figure, labelled a ‘professor’, ‘playboy’, ‘priest of the Russian Orthodox Church’, ‘itinerant monk’ or ‘(half-)crazy (pseudo-)mystic’. Some mistakenly believe his name to be a nom de plume and believe him to be the author of The Protocols. Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus was born in 1862, the son of a minor noble landowner. A pious and erudite man, he became known as an apocalyptic thinker and prolific religious writer.4 On the losing side in the forced modernization and secularization of Russia, he was among those who interpreted the downfall of their own world as the end of the world in general. Pilgrimages and association with charismatic preachers and miracle-workers led Nilus to develop a mystical Christian faith, based on signs and wonders. Nilus was a follower of the famous Russian religious thinker Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900) and the charismatic Father Ioann (John) of Kronstadt (1829–1908) and, like them, was driven by apocalyptic fears. In his commentary, Nilus interpreted the Protocols as an unveiling of the hidden strategy of the Satanic forces of darkness—and their worldly allies—in their unremitting struggle against the divine forces of light, a struggle that seemed to have entered its final stage at the turn of the century.5 Nilus was not a racist antisemite. More accurately, his attitude was that of traditional Christian anti-Judaism, according to which the Jews have a central, predetermined role to play in the cosmic drama of Passion and Salvation. Nilus also perceived a tragic dimension to the negative role that the Jews have had thrust upon them, as pathfinders and agents of the Antichrist. He believed that their fateful part had to be played out according to the divine plan until the end of history, leading them to struggle against Christianity and to strive for world power, as The Protocols revealed. At the end-times the Jews would inevitably recognize and repent of their apostasy and turn to Christ, and therefore the Jews have to be preserved. For Nilus, as for Solov’ev and many other Russian religious thinkers, the ‘ultimate resolution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ lies in conversion, that is, the elimination of Judaism, not of Jews. Nilus expressly appealed to his readers not to harbour enmity towards the Jews, who were, after all, simply blind and misguided by their leaders. 6 Nilus spent several years near the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn’, working in the archives and conversing with the elder monks (startsy). Most of his writings and popular publications date from this period, including the diary On the Banks of God’s River, a kind of chronicle of monastic life at Optina. Other works deal with the lives of the desert fathers in Egypt and of Russian hermits; they describe encounters with

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elders, miracle-workers and ‘holy fools’, and report prophetic dreams, prophecies and the activities of demonic forces. Nilus regarded the Russian revolution, which to him seemed to bear out some of the predictions in The Protocols, as an eschatological catastrophe and the beginning of the reign of the Antichrist, the false messiah of the Jews. Nilus refused to leave Russia and joined the catacomb church. He was arrested, tried and imprisoned several times, yet—despite being well known to the authorities—was always released again. Finally, he found refuge in the village of Krutets (some eighty miles northeast of Moscow), in the house of the local parish priest. There, in January 1929, he died of a heart attack. With the end of the Soviet regime, Nilus and his writings have been rediscovered in Russia. Nilus is a virtual cult-figure in ecclesiastical and nationalist circles, and his grave has become a place of pilgrimage. His books—especially those that contain The Protocols—are continually republished and can be found in Christian bookshops in even the most distant provinces. Congresses, lectures and the establishment of an annual Sergei Nilus Prize by the St Petersburg organization Orthodox St Petersburg (Pravoslavnyi Sankt-Peterburg) testify to the high honour he is granted, as does his presence in the press and on the Internet. In this predominantly religious environment, The Protocols are read and understood—quite as Nilus intended—apocalyptically, as the unveiling of the hidden struggle, the hidden onslaught of anti-Christian forces. The Protocols is thus part of a long tradition of apocalyptic writings, many of which, like The Protocols themselves, are apocryphal: the famous and widely distributed prophecies of Saint Serafim of Sarov (allegedly discovered and deciphered by Sergei Nilus), for example, or the ‘Dream of Father Ioann of Kronstadt’, an anti-Bolshevik text fabricated in the early 1920s. In Russia today there is a widespread belief in a conspiracy hatched by Satanic forces and their earthly helpers. Through countless tracts and brochures, eschatological, demonological and anti-Jewish predictions like the following—evolved over centuries—are now being revived and propagated: expectations of the Antichrist (a Jew from the tribe of Dan who will become the false messiah of the Jews); manifestations of the ‘number of the beast’ and the ‘mystery of iniquity’ (2 Thessalonians 2:7) and other signs of the end-times; the appearance of demonic beings; and, significantly, Jewish ritual murder of Christians. The effect of such propaganda was apparent in April 1993 when three monks in the newly reopened monastery Optina Pustyn’ were killed

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by a man who was, apparently, mentally disturbed. The extreme nationalist press, including the major Communist newspaper Pravda, appealed to the authority of Sergei Nilus as an ‘outstanding expert in Jewish symbolism, Zionism and Masonry’, and thus interpreted the act as an attack by the Antichrist (supposedly born in 1962 in Israel) and as a Jewish (‘Hasidic’) ritual murder commissioned by conspiratorial Satanic powers.7 In Optina, one of the most important religious sites in Russia, the memory of The Protocols and of their publisher Sergei Nilus is carefully preserved and honoured. Visitors are proudly shown the house where Nilus lived from 1907 to 1912 and the hermitage of St John the Baptist, where the supposedly original manuscript of The Protocols had been kept. The Optina monks are convinced of the authenticity of this ‘document’, since Nilus received the blessing of the elders while working on The Protocols in Optina. Another centre of anti-Jewish apocalyptic thought is the famous Holy Trinity-St Sergii Monastery, the home of the Moscow Theological Academy. In 1993 the monastery’s publishing house brought out a book called Russia before the Second Coming, an anthology of apocalyptic and antiJewish conspiracy myths.8 This book, which contains excerpts from Nilus’s writings and from the Protocols, was published in an edition of 100,000 copies. It became an immediate bestseller and has been republished repeatedly since then (including in many pirated editions). In the meantime, the text has swollen to two fat folio volumes.9 Apparently, doctrines about the activities of the Evil Ones (Satan, the Antichrist, the demons) and their allies on earth (the Jews) have forced the traditional Christian Good News off the stage.10 There are, however, those who oppose all of this. As early as the 1980s, the charismatic Orthodox priest Aleksandr Men’ commissioned the translation of Norman Cohn’s classic study of The Protocols in order to combat antisemitism within Russian Orthodoxy. In September 1990 Men’, a baptized Jew, was killed. The circumstances of this crime have never been clarified, but many suspect that Men’s battle against The Protocols may have been one of the reasons for his assassination.11 In July 2001 Mikhail Oshtrakh, the president of the Jewish National Autonomy of Sverdlovsk Oblast, sought to initiate legal proceedings against the local diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church for incitement to ethnic and religious hatred against Jews and Judaism by its distribution of a book by Nilus containing The Protocols. The case garnered a lot of attention, including that of the international Jewish community. The World Jewish Congress condemned the publication and dissemination of The

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Protocols under the benediction of local Orthodox Church authorities.12 The state attorney’s office, however, refused to pursue the case, arguing that it lacked funds to have Nilus’s book examined by experts and a report written.13 Outside of ecclesiastical circles, The Protocols was and is promoted by extreme right-wing and antisemitic political organizations. One of the first to do so was the notorious Pamiat’ movement, under its leader, the radical nationalist and antisemite, Dmitrii Vasil’ev. Pamiat’ promoted The Protocols in its publications and meetings even in the mid-1980s, that is, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union.14 Although publishers of The Protocols initially justified themselves in the name of glasnost’, cynically claiming to offer readers a chance to form their own opinions about ‘probably the most mysterious document of the twentieth century’, later publications rejected all doubts about the authenticity of this ‘document’. Up to the present day, The Protocols is continually republished as a slender pamphlet that one can buy for a few roubles on street corners and in subway stations. The extensive collection of Russian editions of The Protocols even includes one supposedly published by the ‘Department of Information and Kulture [sic]’of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Among the public defenders of The Protocols are well-known writers and publicists such as Dmitrii Balashov, Petr Palamarchuk and Stanislav Kuniaev, as well as the widely respected philologist and specialist in Old Russian literature, Iurii Begunov, 15 and the late Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev) of St Petersburg and Ladoga, the second highest-ranking cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church and a member of its Holy Synod.16 By far the most influential propagandist for the notion of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, however, is Oleg Platonov, an economist and historian who is apparently quite well funded by patriotic Russian sponsors. Platonov publishes numerous thick tomes in which he offers countless ‘proofs’, gathered from archives the world over, of the workings of secret powers.17 Il’ia Glazunov and The Protocols Besides open propaganda, there are, of course, more subtle ways of fostering The Protocols and its message. The work of Il’ia S. Glazunov (born 1930), probably Russia’s best known and most popular painter, offers a good example of this. Exhibitions of Glazunov’s paintings attract record numbers of people, and senior state representatives have no qualms about fraternizing with the artist. His works are distributed in millions of reproductions through magazines, calendars, posters and cheap brochures, but they are

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also featured in expensive art albums. Glazunov is an extraordinarily successful and, at the same time, an extremely tasteless painter: his critics call him korol’ kicha, ‘the king of kitsch’. He is also an aggressive nationalist, chauvinist and—somewhat more discreetly—an antisemite and an advocate of conspiracy theories, beliefs he first displayed long before it became fashionable in postmodern, post-Soviet Russia to adopt extreme-right postures. In the 1960s Glazunov was among the founders of informal ‘patriot’ associations such as the Fatherland Club (1962–8), the antisemitic Russian Club (founded in 1968) and the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (founded in 1966), from which the notorious Pamiat’ movement emerged in the mid-1980s. Its leader, Dmitrii Vasil’ev, spent several years working as Glazunov’s secretary.18 Glazunov’s large artistic oeuvre can be characterized as an encyclopaedia of bad taste: sometimes it is accompanied by bombastic religiousness, sometimes by a tendency towards the pornographic; and— if the viewer knows how to decode Glazunov’s symbolism—one can discern in his works illustrations of the myth of the ‘Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy’. Probably Glazunov’s most popular and most frequently reproduced work, the gigantic canvas Grand Experiment of 1990, offers a classic example of these visual references to the ‘Jewish conspiracy’. In this work, which features eminent figures and events of twentieth-century Russian history, Glazunov uses the collage technique that he usually favours, combining an Old Master style with elements of a peculiar comic-like propaganda art. In the painting’s centre—framed by a large, red, fivepointed star or pentagram, which, according to Glazunov, is ‘an ancient cabalistic sign, a symbol of evil’ 19—are portraits of leading Marxists and Bolsheviks (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin, Dzerzhinskii), the poets of revolution (Gorky and Mayakovsky), the founder of abstract painting (Kandinsky) and, most prominently, Jews (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Uritskii, Kamenev, Kaganovich, Radek, Luxemburg, Béla Kun). On the outer left-hand margin one can recognize the Jewish assassin of the Tsar, Iakov Mikhailovich (or Iankel Khaimovich) Iurovskii, who is drinking blood-red liquid from a cup. Not far from him, in the lower left-hand corner, are his victims: Tsar Nicholas II and his family who were murdered as captives of the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg in 1918. The heads of the Tsar, the Tsarina and their five children are surrounded by haloes; underneath them is a sea of fire in which there is a wriggling serpent covered with five-pointed stars. Saint George, the patron saint of Moscow, is piercing the serpent’s head with a lance.

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Only on a superficial reading does this painting appear as a confusing amalgamation of scenes and portraits; on closer examination, it contains a clear message. At the centre of the Red Star—in other words, in the centre of evil—there is another star, a pentagram, covered with cabalistic, alchemical and astrological signs. Placed directly in the middle, this peculiar sign is obviously the key to understanding the whole horrible action presented by the painting. The small pentagram is none other than the ‘Seal of Antichrist’, which Glazunov borrowed from the title page of Near Is the Coming Antichrist and the Kingdom of the Devil on Earth by Sergei Nilus, published in 1911 by the Holy Trinity monastery at Sergiev Posad. This book contains The Protocols. Tracing this key source makes the meaning of Glazunov’s blunt and demagogical symbolism immediately clear: Marx and the—mostly Jewish—Bolsheviks are depicted as agents of the ‘Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy’ as described in The Protocols, and their victim is none other than Holy Russia. At this point, the serpent on Glazunov’s painting can also be decoded: it is the ‘Symbolic Serpent’ described in The Protocols, and represents the progress of the Jewish conspiracy. Starting from Jerusalem at the time of Solomon, the serpent’s head moves through the European states until, with Zionist immigration, it returns to its point of origin. The serpent signifies that the world is ruled from (and, literally, encircled by) Zion.20 Glazunov’s painting ‘exposes’ those truly responsible for Russia’s dismal fate and sufferings in the twentieth century; in other words, it serves the same purpose as The Protocols. The function of ‘Jewish conspiracy’ myths Having presented several ways in which The Protocols and its message have been popularized in post-Soviet Russia, we now turn to the function of myths of a Jewish conspiracy against the background of twentieth-century Russian religion and ideology. First, a clarification: there have always been and always will be conspiracies, of course, and some of them have even been successful. Some may have involved Jews. However, the notion of a Jewish (world) conspiracy is a very different matter. It claims that the course of a whole historical epoch, perhaps (according to The Protocols) all human history since Solomon’s reign, is the direct and intended result of a conspiracy, that is, the secret, co-ordinated, planned deeds of a specific group: the Jews and their leaders. The myth of a Jewish conspiracy is based on an all-encompassing Manichaean and teleological worldview.21 As such, this conspiracy theory

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possesses structural features shared with, on the one hand, Marxist-Leninist ideology (which held Russia in its sway for many generations) and, on the other, Russia’s other dominant interpretive system, Orthodox Christianity. The shared structural features of The Protocols, popular conceptions of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of history and Russian Orthodox eschatology are:

· · ·

a radical division of the world into absolute good and absolute evil; the belief that the history of humanity is governed by ‘higher’ powers and directed according to a great plan towards an ultimate goal; belief in the hidden or veiled nature of the driving forces of history and of history’s villains, which have to be revealed, unmasked, and overcome.

History as (transcendent or immanent) salvation (Heilsgeschichte) is based on oppositions: good and evil, light and darkness, Christ and Antichrist. The struggle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, or the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, which leads to a decisive battle (the ‘last battle’, as it is called in the lyrics of ‘The Internationale’), is a central element of Christian as well as Marxist eschatology and demonology. National Socialism is also interpreted as a kind of dualist ‘political religion’, which demonizes Judaism and gives a religious, redemptive significance to the universal struggle of the lightbearing Aryans against the ‘Antichrist of world history’ (Goebbels’s epithet for the Jews). The urgency remains the same: salvation (or ‘final solution’) of the world through naming, uncovering and overcoming the agents of destruction. This radically Manichaean dichotomy is also the basis for the myth of a world conspiracy as depicted in The Protocols. Within Stalinism, the theory of ‘two camps’ and the doctrine of the opposition between the system of victorious socialism and the system of dying and rotting capitalism became the basis of the dominant Weltanschauung. Correspondingly, conspiracy theories were continually produced in order to explain socialism’s faults and disruptions. These theories generally served to blame others for one’s own failures. New campaigns were launched to detect, unmask and liquidate supposed ‘saboteurs’, ‘underminers’ and ‘destructive elements’, who worked in the dark and at the command of foreign powers. Even the ‘unmasking’ of ‘Judas Trotsky’ and his followers had clearly antisemitic features. The campaign against cosmopolitanism launched during the post-war period was emphatically directed against the Jews as ‘rootless people’. This was simultaneously a

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struggle against the supposed agents of modernity and against the western way of life. The massive anti-Zionist campaign in the Soviet media after the 1967 Six-Day War and during the 1970s was typical: it was merely another manifestation of the belief in a conspiracy of ‘international finance capital’. Once it has been internalized, a Manichaean worldview remains highly potent, even in the face of complete breaks or reversals of ideology. Thus, in today’s Russia, there is many a former Marxist who has made a facile exchange: the ‘class enemy’ of the old days, the worldhistorical opponent of the forces of progress, has become ‘the corrupter of Russia’. He can take the form of a mythologized, demonized ‘world Judaism’, be identified with Western Europe or the United States, or appear more generically as the spectre of globalization. Once again, the wave of liberalism, pluralism and capitalism sweeping Russia is experienced as a threat and (some) Russians see themselves as dominated and betrayed by the West. Now that the ‘spectre of communism’ has died for Russians, the ‘spectre of conspiracy’ has become livelier than ever. The concept that history is orderly, linear and runs towards a goal (that is, is not random or cyclical) is a Judaeo-Christian one. The unity of historical processes is grounded in God’s plan, contained in the famous ‘Book of Seven Seals’ and ‘revealed’ to believers in its essential phases. Christian fundamentalists believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans, meaning that God has everything under control. The beginning and end of history are predetermined, and thus not subject to human intervention. The end of history, and thus its meaning-giving goal, is presented in the Apocalypse: the last decisive battle, the Last Judgement, the defeat of the forces of evil, the Kingdom of God. Marxism took over this teleological schema and ‘secularized’ it by replacing the revealed, providential plan of salvation with this-worldly progress and with history’s ‘natural laws’: class struggle, world revolution, victory over the oppressors and a classless society as paradise on earth. The myth of conspiracy is also based—like Christian or Marxist eschatology—on the belief that history is orderly and unfolds according to an agenda, namely, the step-by-step plan that will take the mighty conspirators to their goal: a Jewish world state. The Protocols purportedly reveals precisely this plan. In other words: the Elders have everything under control. It is not even necessary to know the exact contents of The Protocols (they vary); the very existence of The Protocols ‘proves’ that there is a conspiracy. Like every conspiracy theory, The Protocols promises access to a reality that is, by its very nature, hidden. Nonetheless, the most decisive events

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occur precisely in this hiddenness. The notion of an occult power, a ‘hidden hand’ that secretly steers the happenings we see in the visible world, is an ancient and common phenomenon, perhaps the ‘anthropological constant’ at the base of all conspiracy theories. 22 The notion is also central to the Marxist scheme, according to which historical events are only apparently accidental. In reality they are driven by ‘inner, hidden laws’ that one must ‘discover’. 23 We are therefore surrounded by a superficial, misleading veil; what is essential and real all takes place behind this veil. Insight into this realm of ‘higher reality’ is, of course, beyond the reach of the average person. Only the initiated or visionaries—seers, prophets, apocalyptic thinkers—that is, people with the ‘right’ consciousness are able to pass this threshold, pierce the veil, and press forward to the truth. The same holds true when it comes to recognizing the Antichrist and his destructive activities, for the Antichrist appears in the cleverly counterfeited likeness of Christ but is, of course, his antithesis. As Vladimir Solov’ev shows in his famous Short Tale of the Antichrist (1900), the Antichrist appears as a charismatic personality and benefactor—exactly like the Jewish ruler in The Protocols—yet very few are able to penetrate and recognize the deception. The notion that the real is hidden in a sphere above or beyond the world of the senses has widespread roots in Russia. One finds it, in an elaborated form, in those religious philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who draw on Platonic and neo-Platonic tradition. One such philosopher, Pavel Florenskii (1882–1937), labelled Plato’s philosophy as ‘realism’, since it shows man how he can participate in the truly Real, in the hidden being of the Ideas. Less esoteric (and therefore more broadly influential) is the notion of a world beyond the senses that, nonetheless, impinges on the here and now. One finds such notions in the teachings of Helena Blavatskaia (1831–91), Nikolai Rerikh (1874–1947), and Daniil Andreev (1906–59), which have enjoyed a popular revival in post-Soviet Russia. Their writings are full of cosmic, occult conspiracies, of higher beings who direct earthly events, or of secret lodges and brotherhoods working to realize a comprehensive plan for the final victory of good or evil. 24 If the mystery is unmasked—and the unmasking can be had for a few roubles on every street corner—then everyone can participate in the mystery. The mythic recounting of conspiracies promises to reveal the connection between a hidden reality and the world of the everyday. It grants viewers a look behind the curtain, lets them leaf through the script and points them to the ‘hidden hand’ that pulls the strings on the stage of history.

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Conclusion With the beginning of glasnost’ and perestroika, which sought to end state censorship and monopoly of information, and finally with the collapse of the Soviet system, Soviet citizens suddenly found themselves overwhelmed by a flood of new and conflicting information. Confused and anxious, inexperienced at picking their way through the jungle of news reports, many turned to simple and simplifying explanations that corresponded with familiar (ideological) patterns of thought. This was the moment of les terribles simplificateurs and their conspiracy scenarios. The conspiracy theorists had an easy time of it, because the high expectations and almost utopian hopes that ordinary people had placed in the new social system during the perestroika period—the values and slogans of which (‘market economy’, ‘liberty’, ‘economic reforms’) were identified as western—were utterly disappointed: politics, the economy and life in general failed to improve as promised. The result was a defensive reaction, spite and the revival of old oppositions. As is well known, conspiracy theories derive their attraction from their capacity for radical simplification of a complex and confusing reality. Moreover, they offer a clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, friend and foe, between one’s own community and ‘others’: a dichotomy that tends to consolidate the community in itself and against ‘others’. Finally, they promise a future consolation; that is, once the hidden enemy is detected and overcome, the times of suffering will end and redemption will be just ahead. Many Russians continue to see themselves and their country as victims, as the mere playthings of those powers whose master plan one can supposedly decipher. Unfortunately, they do not recognize that they thereby place themselves at the mercy of spectres first invoked a century ago, spectres that Russia will not be rid of for some time to come.

Notes 1

2

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‘Programa zavoevan’ia mira evreiami’, Znamia (SPb), 1903, no. 190 (28 August, Old Syle/10 September, New Style), 2; no. 191 (29 August/11 September), 2; no. 192 (30 August/12 September), 2; no. 193 (31 August/13 September), 1–2; no. 194 (1 September/14 September), 1–2; no. 195 (2 September/15 September), 1–2; no. 196 (3 September/16 September), 2; no. 197 (4 September/17 September), 2; no. 200 (7 September/20 September), 6. See, e.g., Cesare G. De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. from the Italian by Richard Newhouse (Lincoln and London, 2004); Vadim Skuratovskii, Problema avtorstva ‘Protokolov sionskikh mudretsov’ (Kiev, 2001).

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6 7

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Sergei Nilus, Velikoe v malom i Antikhrist, kak blizkaia politicheskaia vozmozhnost’. Zapiski pravoslavnogo (Tsarskoe Selo, 1905). On Nilus’s biography, as well as for literature by and about him, see my article in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 21 (Nordhausen, 2003), 1063– 7, available at www.bautz.de/bbkl/n/nilus_s_a.shtml (viewed 13 May 2004). See Michael Hagemeister, ‘Vladimir Solov’ev and Sergej Nilus: apocalypticism and Judeophobia’, in Wil van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, Evert van der Zweerde (eds), Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist (Leuven, 2000), 287– 96. Nilus, Velikoe v malom, 323. Vladislav Shumskii, ‘Pechat’ Antikhrista. Po povodu ubiistva v Optinoi Pustyni’, Den’, no. 22 (102), 6–12 June 1993, 5; cf. also Dmitrii Gerasimov, ‘Sataninskoe plemia. Kto stoit za ubiitsei inokov?’, Pravda, no. 85, 5 May 1993, 4; Aleksandr Korolev, ‘“Brat Satany”. Ritual’noe ubiistvo monakhov v Optinoi Pustyni’, Trud, 5 May 1993, 4; Ieromonakh Tikhon, ‘“Nevidimaia bran”’, Literaturnaia Rossiia, no. 20, 21 May 1993, 6–7. Sergei Fomin, Rossiia pered vtorym prishestviem. Materialy k ocherku Russkoi eskhatologii (Moscow, 1993). Sergei Fomin and Tamara Fomina (eds), Rossiia pered vtorym prishestviem. Materialy k ocherku Russkoi eskhatologii, 2 vols (Moscow and St Petersburg, 1998). See Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Politicheskoe pravoslavie: Russkie pravoslavnye natsionalisty i fundamentalisty, 1995–2001 gg. (Moscow, 2003), 51–72. See Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, ‘Contextualizing the mystery: three approaches to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, Kritika, vol. 4, no. 2, 2003, 397–8. See Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union’s (UCSJ) Action Alert message, ‘Infamous antisemitic forgery being spread in Russia’, 6 December 2001, available at the UCSJ website at www.fsumonitor.com/stories/ 120601Russ4.shtml (viewed 13 May 2004). See ‘Sverdlovskie evrei obidelis’ na Pravoslavnuiu Tserkov’, 13 November 2001, at http://rus-sky.org/history/library/articles/apn.htm (viewed 13 May 2004). See, e.g., Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred. The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York, 1993), 204–21. See Iurii Begunov, Tainye sily v istorii Rossii. Sbornik statei i dokumentov (St Petersburg, 1996). See, e.g., Ioann (Snychev), Bitva za Rossiiu. Pravoslavie i sovremennost’ (St Petersburg, 1993); Ioann (Snychev), Samoderzhavie dukha: Ocherki russkogo samosoznaniia (St Petersburg, 1994). See Oleg Platonov, Ternovyi venets Rossii. Tainaia istoriia masonstva 1731–1996 (Moscow, 1996); Oleg Platonov, Ternovyi venets Rossii. Taina bezzakoniia: iudaizm i masonstvo protiv Khristianskoi tsivilizatsii (Moscow, 1998); Oleg Platonov, Ternovyi venets Rossii. Zagadka Sionskikh protokolov (Moscow, 1999). See Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953–1985 (Moscow, 2003). I. Glazunov, in Panorama, 31 August 1994, 20, quoted in Semyon Reznik, The Nazification of Russia: Antisemitism in the Post-Soviet Era (Washington, D.C., 1996), 239. On the ‘Symbolic Serpent’ as an anti-Jewish symbol, see Cesare G. De Michelis, ‘Ot Ierusalima do Ierusalima. (Tsikl “Simvolicheskogo Zmiia” v “Protokolakh

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Sionskikh mudretsov”)’, in Wolf Moskovich et al. (eds), Oh, Jerusalem! (Pisa and Jerusalem, 1999), 161–72. These observations are based on the insightful definitions of conspiracy theories developed by Dieter Groh and Geoffrey Cubitt; see Dieter Groh, ‘The temptation of conspiracy theory, or: why do bad things happen to good people?’, in Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (eds), Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York, 1987), 1–37; and Geoffrey T. Cubitt, ‘Conspiracy myths and conspiracy theories’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, vol. 20, 1989, 12–26. See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York and London, 1962), 123. Friedrich Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Studienausgabe, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), 212. See Bernice G. Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY and London, 1997).

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RASPUTIN THE NEW Mythologies of Sanctity in Post-Soviet Russia Stella Rock

Grigorii Rasputin has always been a contentious and mythogenic figure. As George Sava declared in his 1941 preface to the extraordinary Rasputin Speaks: Writers of historical biographies are chained to the wheels of fashion as surely as women are bound to the strange vagaries of clothes. Overnight yesterday’s devils become to-day’s saints, and, mutatis mutandis, heroes become ruffians . . . Rasputin has suffered likewise.1 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in both popular and academic spheres attempts have been made to rehabilitate the pre-Soviet past and explain the immense upheavals of modern Russian history. Sadly, xenophobia and antisemitism are recurring motifs,2 and the revisionist media campaign explored in this paper is no exception. Rasputin, portrayed as a devil and lecherous drunk in western biographies and Soviet historiography alike, is now being refashioned as a holy man, even as a saint and martyr, by Russian nationalists. Although Russia remains, as the Soviet joke observes, ‘a country with an unpredictable past’,3 the rewriting of history is not unique to post-Soviet Russia. The canonization of individuals for political purposes has also been evident in other churches and other periods. There is, however, a marked tendency among post-Soviet Russian nationalists to seek the rehabilitation of their heroes by sanctification, due in part to the popular revival of Russian Orthodoxy and a widespread suspicion of Soviet historiography. In the last decade or so, Tsar Nicholas II, the Emperor Paul I (hailed as a ‘tsar-martyr’ and ritual murder victim),4 and Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible)5 have all been promoted as saints, and the popularity of this strategy raises uncomfortable questions about the manipulation of Russian Orthodoxy by xenophobic and antisemitic nationalist groups.

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National saints and holy nations National saints are an important component of the symbolic language of nationalism, overlaid as they are with emotional resonance and almost unchallengeable legitimacy. For the religious nationalist they offer evidence of the nation’s blessedness and a powerful spiritual armoury, but there are pragmatic precedents for the political manipulation of saints. The mediaeval prince Aleksandr Nevskii, for example, was canonized during the reign of Ivan IV for his ‘courage and military valour’ against the Swedes and Teutonic Knights.6 Tsar Ivan was himself an inveterate campaigner against foreign neighbours (including the Swedes) and his military campaigns were mobilized and justified by religious rhetoric.7 St Aleksandr also presented a useful historical parallel for Stalin, who had him repackaged as a popular hero during the Second World War, named an air squadron in the officially atheist Soviet army after him and, in 1942, resurrected the Order of Aleksandr Nevskii (instituted by Catherine I) to reward the skill and bravery of officers. 8 Sanctified warrior princes, of whom Aleksandr Nevskii is the archetype, ‘are to be found time and again in periods or areas of political stress or crisis’. 9 Their construction, and the creation of similar ‘national symbols’, may be considered part of the ‘semiotic behaviour’, identified by Yuri Lotman and B. A. Uspensky, that intensifies in times of war, internal crisis, and change. 10 The cultural sea-change of the late twentieth century provoked an extraordinary flurry of Russian canonizations, which may not have been motivated by political considerations but which provided precedents taken up with enthusiasm by the nationalist movement. Prince Dmitrii Donskoi, for example, was formally canonized only in 1988 for leading the victory over the Tatars in the battle of Kulikovo field in 1380. Arguably, preparations for this event began during the buildup to the 1980 anniversary of the battle, when Soviet officials ordered the preparation of museum exhibitions commemorating the victory. 11 One of the exhibitions at the Kulikovo field museum in 2003 included photographs and memorabilia from the ships, tanks and army divisions (including some serving in Chechnia in 1997) named in honour of Prince Dmitrii Donskoi,12 and the museum emphasizes the links between the Kulikovo battle and other victories such as the Second World War. To ‘raise the level of national self-consciousness’ and overcome the Tatars, as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad explains, must have taken huge spiritual resources, and the 1988 canonization recognized this. 13 However, Dmitrii Donskoi’s elevation to sainthood has provided

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the nationalist movement with symbolic ammunition. Extreme nationalist groups now commemorate the Kulikovo battle annually, with public speeches such as Vladimir Osipov’s in 2001: 621 years ago Prince-saint Dmitrii Donskoi conquered the horde, [a battle] in which, besides Mongol-Tatars, inhabitants of the Caucasus and other filth from the Steppe, even mercenaries from Genoa fought. Born on Kulikovo field in bloody battle was the Third Rome, born was the empire of the Russian people.14 Metropolitan Kirill stresses the importance of the relationship between the period during which the canonization occurs and the significance of the saint; Dmitrii Donskoi was not canonized ‘by chance’ six centuries after his death. While Kirill does not make explicit the connection between the Tatar yoke and the Soviet yoke, and the raising of Russian self-consciousness to overcome Soviet patriotism and internationalism, the analogy is hard to miss. ‘Patriotic’ canonizations, those of significance primarily for the Russian state, are not new. In an attempt to promote national unity in the immediate aftermath of the 1861 Emancipation Act, for example, the Synod ‘imbued the [canonization of St Tikhon] with national sentiment and used the canonization to praise the autocracy for emancipating the serfs’.15 The 1903 canonization of Serafim Sarovskii, pushed through by the imperial family, concentrated in one event Nicholas and Alexandra’s religious searchings during the first decade of the reign, expressing an outlook that combined a belief in the emperor’s special place as head of a revitalized ‘Holy Russia’ and a divinely consecrated religious, cultural, and political mission to Asia.16 No canonization has been quite as politically loaded as that of Tsar Nikolai II and his family however, and it was in the context of this canonization that the issue of Rasputin’s sanctity arose. Rasputin’s rise to grace The contemporary political aspirations of those nationalists advocating canonization are significant. Although diverse nationalist groups such as Russian National Unity (RNE) and the National Bolshevik Party have made use of figures such as Ivan IV in their propaganda, it is primarily

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monarchist groups that are seeking to promote them to the ranks of ‘sacred rulers’ stretching from Saints Olga and Vladimir (credited with converting Russia) to the blessed passion-bearers Nicholas and Alexandra. Although the Moscow Patriarchate did not canonize the murdered Romanovs until 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized them in 1981. By the mid-1980s revisionist writings about Rasputin had begun to circulate in samizdat,17and in 1991 a splinter group of the socalled True Russian Orthodox Church canonized the ‘martyr Grigorii’, declaring: The fame of the holy martyr Grigorii (Rasputin) among God’s people in Russia, as a mentor of the future royal new martyrs and confessors, made him an intercessor before the Orthodox Tsar for the Russian people, [who were] suffering from temptation and confusion sown by Masons of various persuasions.18 In 1992, after a concerted effort by nationalists to promote popular veneration of Tsar Nicholas, the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints was ordered to begin studying the historical, moral and religious aspects of the Tsar’s reign, to ascertain whether there were grounds for canonization. By October 1996 the commission had examined the relationship of Rasputin with the royal family, and reasonably concluded that the explanation for his influence lay in the Tsarevich’s haemophilia.19 During this investigation, Oleg Platonov—a leading figure in the campaigns to canonize the Tsar and Rasputin, who had published his antisemitic tract The Murder of the Tsar’s Family in 1991—was invited to deliver a paper on Rasputin to the commission.20 The Tsar and his family were finally canonized as ‘passion-bearers’, a rank of sanctity peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church and awarded those who bear their suffering in Christ-like fashion. It is important to recall that the commission concluded in 1996 that there were no observable grounds within the Tsar’s political and spiritual life to canonize him; only in the nature of his forbearance during imprisonment and execution was scope found to glorify him. As one journalist observed, nine out of ten nationalists campaigning for the Tsar’s canonization fervently believed him to be a victim of Jewish ritual murder. 21 The commission, astonishingly, felt obliged to investigate this possibility, and consulted experts at the Moscow Theological Academy. Their response allowed the commission to conclude that there was no evidence of ritual murder, but not that Jewish ritual murder per se is an antisemitic fiction.22

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A large number of those active in the campaign to canonize the Tsar are now promoting the canonization of Rasputin and other nationalist heroes from the pre-Soviet past, and their methods are increasingly media-savvy. Orthodox nationalist newspapers, in particular Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik) and Orthodox Rus (Rus’ pravoslavnaia), Internet sites and radio stations have hosted a campaign concerted enough to elicit an unusually unambiguous counter-campaign from the Moscow Patriarchate. While the campaign to canonize Nicholas II was waged through newsprint, conferences, audio-visual publications and cheap mass-produced books, the medium of the Internet has become increasingly central to nationalist activities. Mostly reaching white-collar workers and those in higher education,23 above all it has proved useful in raising the nationalists’ profile among journalists. The Rasputin story was reported by the mainstream press in Britain,24 and the editor of Orthodox Rus published a mock ‘round table’ discussion based on interviews he had given foreign journalists. 25 While the Internet may reach the intellectual and economic elite of Russia, it is unlikely to stir up the mass devotion necessary to prove popular recognition of Rasputin’s sanctity. Cheap editions of publications such as Rasputin’s autobiography, The Life of an Experienced Wanderer, and his Thoughts and Reflections have been mass-produced in recent years. Miracles are particularly valuable in furthering the canonization process, and the newspapers Russian Herald and Orthodox Rus have been quick to report them. ‘Icons of the holy martyr Grigorii’ are apparently honoured from Siberia to Belarus, and have begun to weep chrism and blood.26 These ‘icons’ do not always go unchallenged, however. One illustration of ‘St Grigorii the Great Martyr’ provoked a letter to the Russian Herald from no less a figure than the niece of his monarchist murderer Purishkevich. She protested that Rasputin had taken no holy orders, and was killed for spying during the First World War and conspiring with government ministers, and therefore should not be depicted in the robes of a schema-monk (the highest rank of monastic life) with a halo.27 In life, as in posthumous infamy, media representations of Rasputin idealized, exaggerated, distorted and fabricated aspects of his behaviour and character. This in itself is a boon to the nationalists who seek to recreate Rasputin as saint and martyr. They can point to generally acknowledged fabrications such as the alleged affair between Rasputin and the Empress Aleksandra, and argue that all negative stories were similarly manufactured. In order to explain away some of his better-documented misdeeds, however, Rasputin’s admirers have developed a number of

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theories, among which is that Rasputin had a double who behaved scandalously in public in order to discredit the real Rasputin.28 Other explanations discredit the sources themselves. Platonov points out that Soviet historians did no research on Rasputin, simply using the same, false sources as his pre-revolutionary critics. Several writers observe that historians have uncritically used the evidence of his murderers, who clearly have every reason to demonize him, and argue that those who believe the evidence of Rasputin’s daughter are also misled, for Maria married a Mason and was hypnotized into writing slanderous memoirs about her own father.29 Grand Duchess Elizaveta, widow of the murdered Grand Duke Sergei and perhaps the least contentious of the Romanov saints, openly objected to the ‘elder Grigorii’, but her reservations are dismissed because she had no personal knowledge of him and was therefore swayed by rumours. 30 Finally, the royal family loved and respected Rasputin, and considered him a ‘man of God’. They weren’t naive, they investigated every complaint and found it to be false, and we should respect their judgement on this issue.31 This paper is not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the accusations levelled at Rasputin, however. It is concerned rather with the metalanguage of myth, to use Roland Barthes’s model of mythologies,32 with the message communicated via myths spun around the symbol of Rasputin. Two aspects of current Rasputin mythology that convey important elements of nationalist ideology will be considered below: Rasputin as embodiment of the narod (folk or people, similar to the German Volk) and Rasputin as embodiment or representative of martyred and holy Russia. Mythologies of sanctity: Rasputin as narod and ‘martyred Russia’ Rasputin apologists are not uniform in their approach to his rehabilitation, and he attains varying degrees of sanctity as a wanderer, elder, miracle-worker and ultimately ‘great martyr’ (velikomuchenik). At the less saintly end of the scale he is presented as a good, simple, devout peasant—the embodiment of the Russian narod—slandered or misled by foreigners. Platonov, for example, portrays Rasputin as ordinary rather than extraordinary, his spiritual and moral values those of the ‘real’ Russian peasant. Loving hard work, preoccupied with spiritual matters rather than material profit, permeated with love, truth, generosity and compassion: this is Platonov’s narod. Rasputin is easily deceived by Jewish and Masonic swindlers, especially in financial and legal matters, because of his lack of regard for the material and his innate honesty.33 The myth of the honest

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Russian manipulated by devious foreigners appears often in nationalist publications, as an explanation for the Bolshevik revolution for example, and in articles accusing foreigners (especially those from the Caucasus) of taking over Moscow’s markets. Platonov identifies two groups of fraudsters surrounding Rasputin: the ‘internationalists’ (among whom he numbers Prince Mikhail Andronnikov, the banker Dmitrii Rubenstein and Khvostov, Minister for the Interior) who had links with the darkest antiRussian forces, French Masons and German underground organizations; and ‘frauds in the name of their national community’, in other words, Jews. Platonov explains Rasputin’s evident sympathy for Jews as their cunning exploitation of his compassion for all the ‘oppressed and insulted’; naturally Platonov refrains from commenting on this oppression. Rasputin’s apparent embodiment of an idealized Russian peasantry was part of his appeal in life and in death. In nationalist publications, remarks attributed to Rasputin’s more respectable contemporaries, such as the Tsar’s observation that ‘[Rasputin] is a good, simple, religious, Russian person’, are often cited.34 The ‘honest Russian peasant’ aspect of Rasputin propaganda also invokes the ‘popular monarchism’ myth: autocratic rulers are benevolent towards their humble subjects, and humble subjects are loyal to the autocrat. Nicholas and Alexandra were also convinced that his devotion to them reflected the devotion of the ‘real’ people of Russia. ‘The whole of Russia—the real Russia, poor, humble, peasant Russia—is with me’, Alexandra wrote, responding to letters apparently forged by the Tsarist secret police.35 Any problems that arise in an autocratic system are the fault of bureaucrats and oligarchs. Similarly, in nationalist publications it is these dishonest, self-serving individuals who provide all evidence against Rasputin and the royal family, while the narod could always see the truth. Why would one believe the stories of disloyal generals, who blame the Tsar for military failures and the general collapse, and declare that persuading him to abdicate was a patriotic act? This was the myth that directed Nicholas and Alexandra’s governance and that, it would seem, some of the peasantry adhered to.36 A landowner of the time recalled that ‘peasants cursed [Rasputin’s] killer’ believing that Rasputin ‘defended the people against the court and they killed him’.37 Rasputin’s generosity and sympathy for ordinary folk is well documented, and his loyalty to the Romanovs hard to challenge, but the ‘popular monarchism’ myth reduces a collapsing, oppressive political system into a loving relationship between peasant and Tsar, symbolic of the mystical union of autocrat and people. According to Platonov: ‘Genuine democracy, in the opinion of Rasputin, lies in the idea of Tsarist power. The Tsar is the

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most perfect expression of the people’s wisdom, the people’s conscience, the people’s will.’38 In the highest accolades, Rasputin is portrayed as a Christ-like figure, killed for the sake of the Tsar. In this martyrdom he embodies suffering Holy Rus, persecuted by her enemies (primarily Jews and Masons) for upholding true Christianity. An akathist (a special hymn) published in 2000 describes Rasputin as ‘chosen from the ends of the earth to serve the Tsar’s family’, ‘a guardian angel’, ‘champion of autocracy’, ‘wonder-worker’, a ‘martyr’ and ‘passion-bearer’ who endured ‘all torture and Jewish filth valiantly’. 39 Details of Rasputin’s murder are deemed to be of ‘ritual significance’; the dead dog, for example, that figures in the narratives of both murderers and witnesses, is interpreted as a ‘talmudic symbol’ of the dead Christ.40 In murdering Rasputin, the killers struck a blow against Orthodox Christianity as a whole. The mythologized identity of Rasputin’s murderers is crucial in this new hagiography, since members of the Russian monarchist Christian nobility hardly fit the mould of ‘Christ-killers’. They are refashioned predominantly as foreigners, Masons, homosexuals and decadent oligarchs, crucifying ‘real’ Russia. In one cheap booklet, Rasputin is described as ‘the first new martyr of Russia’—a novomuchenik—the term reserved for victims of the Bolshevik persecution of Orthodox believers. 41 Thus Rasputin’s death at the hands of monarchist nobles is transformed into the first martyrdom of an atheist regime, and in nationalist writings this means ‘the Jewish yoke’ imposed by the Bolshevik revolution. This type of argument is also apparent in an article published by Russian Herald in their ‘Truth’ section: By the desecration and death of Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin, the Jews and their stooges gained a great deal at once. By abuse of the name of the Tsar’s Friend, the name of the Sovereign Emperor himself was handed over to abuse. The people were dumbfounded by the filth supposedly surrounding the Tsar and Tsarina, and stopped believing in their own divinely appointed Tsarist power. 42 The belief that the ‘enemies of Russia’ were unable to prevail with Rasputin close to the throne, and that Rasputin’s murder was the prologue to a hidden conspiracy to murder the Tsar, intrinsically links Rasputin’s death to the martyrdom of the sanctified royal family. No less a body that the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints declared that ‘the Tsar’s family symbolized Russia worn out and Russia destroyed’,43 and quite logically Rasputin’s admirers see in him also ‘Russia destroyed’.

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As several writers make clear, part of Rasputin’s ‘martyrdom’ was the press campaign against him during his life. The aforementioned akathist declares that the ‘word-arrows and sorcerers’ slanders’ tormented him more than a beating from physical swords and spears,44 and in the persona of Rasputin the ‘true’ Russia is slandered. In one of the earliest articles published in this campaign, Oleg Platonov declared: . . . the myth of Rasputin was created . . . [with] the aim of blackening, defiling and discrediting Russia, [and] her spiritual folk beginning . . . The myth of Rasputin should be regarded as a specially created obstacle (although far from the only one) on the path to understanding of our spiritual, political and national values. And it was created especially in order to obstruct the road of return to those values. 45 Platonov is clear also about who seeks to defile holy Russia, namely, her old enemies: Since the first centuries of Christianity in Rus the enemies of Orthodoxy try to discredit Russian saints and zealots from Feodosii Pecherskii [an eleventh-century monastic] . . . to . . . Ioann of Kronstadt. Jewish sects and Masons undertake everything possible for the undermining of Orthodox ideology and the destruction of the Russian Orthodox kingdom.46 Conclusion The danger of myth, to return briefly to Barthes, is that it makes natural what is artificial, and empties things of meaningful detail. Myth has the banality and superficiality of the slogan, and wields the power of the slogan. Once the Synodal Commission reduced Nicholas and Alexandra from complex human beings to symbols of ‘Russia destroyed’, and despite all the faults in their personal and political lives (enumerated quite soberly by the commission) declared them transformed by the manner of their deaths into saints, they created a myth that makes plausible similar declarations about other ‘national symbols’ and murder victims such as Rasputin and Paul I. This, it should be stressed, is not a quintessentially Russian problem; the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example, also has its political saints and martyrs.47 Nor is it an exclusively Orthodox issue; the Vatican is also facing a campaign to canonize deeply flawed historical figures such as

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Isabella of Spain, 48 who revived the Spanish Inquisition, expelled the Jews from her lands and supported the exploitation of the ‘new world’. Franco instigated this campaign in 1952, believing that Isabella embodied the ideals of ‘national Catholicism’ along with its ‘connotations of religious and racial purity’, 49 and despite fierce opposition from liberals, Spanish bishops continue to lobby for her canonization. However, nationalist exploitation of the symbols and rhetoric of Orthodox Christianity has been particularly effective in Russia. In its failure to condemn the accusation of ritual murder as a dangerous antisemitic myth, and with its historically ambivalent attitude towards newspapers such as Russian Herald, the Moscow Patriarchate has allowed nationalist mythologies to flourish. That is not to say that the Patriarch has ignored the issue of Rasputin’s candidacy for sainthood. In April 2000, he remarked in an interview that ‘enmity and animosity accompanied the activity of Grigorii Rasputin and the church cannot have a favourable attitude toward him because he set himself against the canonical hierarchy’.50 In December 2001 he spoke more vigorously on the subject, observing: In recent times fairly large numbers of, if one can say this, ‘icons’ of Tsar Ivan Groznii, the sadly famous Grigorii Rasputin and other dark historical personalities have appeared, moreover, beautifully produced. They have created prayers, troparia, songs of praise, akathists and liturgies. Some groups of pseudo-zealots for Orthodoxy and autocracy are trying, illegally, ‘by the back door’, to canonize tyrants and opportunists, to teach not very knowledgeable people to venerate them. It is not clear if they are doing this deliberately or unconsciously. If it is deliberate, then they are provocateurs and enemies of the Church, who are tr ying to compromise the Church, to undermine her moral authority. 51 A flurry of polemical articles by Orthodox writers appeared in 2002–3, and those accused of trying to orchestrate Rasputin’s canonization by means of a media campaign have been quick to retaliate with accusations of censorship. Post-Soviet suspicion of historiography is one explanation for the apparent success of these ‘revisionists’, and nationalist writers have capitalized on the legitimate desire to eradicate Soviet misrepresentations: Speaking simply, after decades of distortion of the pre-revolutionary history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian state and

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the Russian people, [this is] a positive process of national-religious revival, recollection and free interpretation by our people of their history, the restoration of national-historical consciousness.52 While predictions are never wise, one should perhaps conclude with some assessment of the campaign’s likelihood of success. The campaigners are a small but proactive group, who successfully campaigned for the canonization of the Tsar and in opposition to Individual Tax Numbers, gaining concessions for believers and the satisfaction of witnessing their concerns about the number of The Beast discussed at the highest levels of government.53 As one cleric has observed: Something similar is happening in church life today. We passively watch the surprising activeness of these sorts of marginals. But if you conducted a sociological survey of parish clergy, not to mention ordinary parishioners, then it would become clear that no small numbers of people are already orientating themselves towards their opinions. It goes to show that in our church sphere the famous sociological law also applies: one madman will always shout down the whole bus. 54 There are, however, significant differences between the campaign to canonize Tsar Nicholas II and that to canonize Rasputin. The latter campaign lacks the backing of the mini media empire Radonezh and, indeed, Radonezh has published and broadcast material opposing the idea. 55 Radonezh heavily backed the canonization of the Tsar, and their assessment of their own influence in this instance is probably accurate: our strength [is] that we are an independent organization and we may criticize that which then, incidentally, after our criticism, changes in the Patriarchate . . . even as we for ten years fought for the glorification, for the canonization of the Tsar’s family. The Patriarchate was of a different opinion, which, as you know, changed. They were canonized.56 Official opposition this time is more concerted, and this may well be the campaign that makes or breaks the nationalist lobby within the church. A round table on Orthodox journalism at the official ‘Christmas Readings’ in 2003 declared that the nationalist media backing the campaign ‘garble the facts of church history, pervert the foundations of the

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Orthodox faith and in the end create a sectarian confession’.57 Tackling the popularity of newspapers such as Russian Herald and Orthodox Rus should significantly limit the influence of nationalists, and this round table also reported that some Moscow parishes have now stopped selling these papers. It remains to be seen how loud Rasputin’s admirers can shout through the megaphone of the Internet. Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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George Sava, Rasputin Speaks (London, 1941), 5. See, for example, Stella Rock, ‘Holocaust denial and the new nationalist historiography’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 35, no. 4, 2001, 64–76. Semyon Reznik, The Nazification of Russia: Antisemitism in the Post-Soviet Era (Washington, D.C., 1996), 34. ‘Pravoslavno-patrioticheskie organizatsii Moskvy zaiavili o nachale protsessa bor’by za kanonizatsiiu Imperatora Pavla’, available on the Sobornost website at www.sobor.ru/news.asp?id=1713 (viewed 11 June 2004). All translations from the Russian, unless otherwise stated, are by the author. See, for example, ‘O blagochestivom tsare Ioanne Groznom’, Vestnik ‘Russkaia liniia’, no. 10, 2001. G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. II: The Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 156. Sergei Bogatyrev, ‘Battle for divine wisdom: the rhetoric of Ivan IV’s campaign against Polotsk’, in E. Lohr and M. Poe (eds), The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917 (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2002), 325–63. John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (London and New York, 1995), 122. Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven and London, 1961), 23; see also Jaakko Lehtovirta, Ivan IV as Emperor : The Imperial Theme in the Establishment of Muscovite Tsardom (Turku, 1999), 157. Yu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspensky, ‘On the semiotic mechanism of culture’, New Literary History, vol. 9, Winter 1978, 211–32. See the Kulikovo museum website, at www.kulpole.ru/RUS/Kul_Bit.htm (viewed 17 August 2005). See the Kulikovo museum website, at www.kulpole.ru/ENG/VIS_E.htm (viewed 17 August 2005). Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, ‘O sobornom proslavlenii novomuchenikov i ispovednikov rossiiskikh XX veka’, a video produced on the occasion of the Jubilee Bishops Congress, 2000. Blagovest-Info news report, 21 September 2001. Chris J. Chulos, ‘Orthodox identity at Russian holy places’, in Chris J. Chulos and Timo Piiraninen (eds), The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation: National Identities in Russia (Aldershot, 2000), 34. Robert L. Nichols, ‘The friends of God: Nicholas II and Alexandra at the canonization of Serafim of Sarov, July 1903’, in Charles E. Timberlake (ed.), Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honour of Donald W. Treadgold (Seattle and London, 1992), 211–12.

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17 According to Oleg Platonov, Nikolai Kozlov (writing as A. A. Shchedrin) appeared as an apologist for Rasputin in samizdat in this period (unrecorded conversation, April 2003). 18 Cited in S. L. Firsov, ‘K voprosu o marginalizatsii soznaniia v sovremennoi religioznoi zhizni pravoslavnoi Rossii’, available on the website of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church at www.bogoslov.ru/ bogoslov/conferences/church_17-201103/firsov_171103.html (viewed 11 June 2004). 19 ‘Tsarskaia sem’ia i G. E. Rasputin’, Materialy sviazannye s voprosom o kanonizatsii tsarskoi sem’i (Moscow, 1997), 54. 20 Interview with Oleg Platonov, Moscow, 6 August 2002, confirmed verbally by a former member of the Commission, Fr Ignatii Krekshin (July 2003). 21 Aleksandr Morozov, NG-religii, 9 August 2000. 22 Sergei Hackel, ‘The relevance of post-Holocaust theology to the thought and practice of the Russian Orthodox Church’, Sobornost, vol. 20, 1998, 7–25 (21). 23 On Russian nationalist use of the Internet, see Stella Rock, ‘Racism and xenophobia in virtual Russia’, in Raphael Walden (ed.), Racism and Human Rights (Leiden and Boston, 2004), 101–24. 24 See, for example, Julius Strauss, ‘Crusade to make Rasputin a saint splits church’, Telegraph, 6 February 2003. 25 ‘Dukh dyshit gde khochet’, Rus’ pravoslavnaia, no. 5–6 (71–2), May 2003. 26 Tatiana Groian, ‘Muchenik za Khrista i za Tsaria’, Russkii vestnik, 20 March 2002, available at www.rv.ru/content.php3?id=193 (viewed 23 August 2005). 27 Russkii vestnik, 20 March 2002, available at www.rv.ru/content.php3?id=196 (viewed 23 August 2005). 28 See, for example, Archbishop of Ivanovo and Kineshemo Amvrosii (Shchurov), ‘Grigorii Rasputin—Bolshoi molitvennik’, Rus’ pravoslavnaia, July– August 2002. 29 I. V. Evsin, Oklevetannyi starets (Riazan, 2002), 68–9. 30 Ibid., 67. 31 O. A. Platonov, Pravda o Grigorii Rasputine (Saratov, 1993). 32 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1984). 33 O. A. Platonov, Ternovyi venets Rossii: Prolog tsareubistva. Zhizn’ i smert’ Grigoriia Rasputina (Moscow, 2001), 250–1. 34 See, for example, Evsin, 10. 35 Brian Moynahan, Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned (London, 1998), 311. 36 See, for example, Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv (eds), The Fall of the Romanovs. Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven and London, 1995), esp. 16–21. 37 Moynahan, 14. 38 Platonov, Prolog tsareubistva, 62. 39 Nikolai Kozlov, Akafist sviatomu mucheniku Grigoriiu Novomu (Russia, 2000). 40 Evsin, 60. 41 Ibid., 33. 42 Tatiana Mironova, ‘Grigorii Rasputin: Obolgannaia zhizn’, obolgannaia smert’’, Russkii vestnik, no. 39–40, October 2002. 43 Komissiia Sviashchennogo Sinoda Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi po kanonizatsii sviatykh, Kanonizatsiia sviatykh v XX veke (Moscow, 1999), 193.

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44 Kozlov, Akafist, 7. 45 Oleg Platonov, ‘Pravda o Grigorii Rasputine’, Russkii vestnik, no. 32, December 1991. 46 Platonov, Prolog tsareubistva, 2. 47 See, for example, Jovan Byford, From ‘Traitor’ to ‘Saint’: Bishop Nikolaj Velimiroviæ in Serbian Public Memory, Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism, 22 (Jerusalem, 2004), available online at http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/actatxt1.html (viewed 14 June 2004). 48 See the campaign website at www.queenisabel.com/ (viewed 9 June 2004). 49 Isambard Wilkinson, ‘Spain seeks sainthood for Isabella’, Telegraph, 23 April 2003. 50 ‘Patriarch Aleksii II of Moscow and All-Rus grants exclusive interview to Profile magazine from the press service of the Department for External Church Relations, Moscow Patriarchate, 28 April 2000’, available online at www.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/0004c.html (viewed 14 June 2004). 51 ‘Ezhegodnoe eparkhial’noe sobranie goroda Moskvy’, Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, no. 1, 2002, 43. 52 ‘Provotsiruiut tserkovnye raskoly’, available on the Russkii vestnik website at www.rv.ru/content.php3?id=898 (viewed 14 June 2004). 53 ‘Grazhdane Rossii mogut ne ukazyvat’ INN v platezhnykh dokumentakh’, available on the ROC website at www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru/ nr112272.htm (viewed 14 June 2004). 54 ‘Ostorozhno, sektantstvo!’, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 3, February 2003. 55 ‘Kak otnosit’sia k samochinnomu “proslavleniiu” i napisaniiu “ikon” Grigoriia Rasputina i Ioanna Groznogo?’, broadcast on Radio Radonezh, 10 February 2003; Protoierei Aleksandr Shargunov, ‘G. Rasputin: Opasnost’ radeleniia v tserkvi’, Radonezh, no. 1 (130), 2003. 56 Interview with Elena Nomakova, Moscow, 30 May 2001. 57 ‘Itogovyi document sektsii “Pravoslavnaia zhurnalistika” XI Rozhdestvenskikh obrazatel’nykh chtenii’, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 1, February 2003.

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Franziska Augstein is an editor at the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung. After studying history in Germany and Britain, she was awarded a Ph.D. at University College London in 1996. In 1999 she published James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth-century Britain. Jan Herman Brinks, a specialist in modern German history, was awarded a Research Fellowship at Sussex University to work on the Nationalist Myths and Modern Media project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. His publications include Children of a New Fatherland: Germany’s Post-War Right-Wing Politics (2000) and Paradigms of Political Change: Luther, Frederick II, and Bismarck. The GDR on Its Way to German Unity (2001). Stephen Burman is Reader in American Studies and Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex. His publications include America in the Modern World: The Transcendence of US Hegemony (1991) and The Black Progress Question: Explaining the African-American Predicament (1995), which was awarded the Myers Center Prize for outstanding work in the field of human rights. Thomas Dörfler holds an M.A. in sociology from the University of Erlangen. His research interests include the sociology of knowledge, psychoanalysis as social science and right-wing subculture. He has published articles in Mittelweg (2004) and Geographica Helvetica (2003) and is co-editor of Postmodern Practices: Beiträge zu einer vergehenden Epoche (Hamburg, 2002). Martin Durham is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wolverhampton. He has written extensively on right-wing politics and is presently working on a study of the American extreme right. He is author of The Christian Right, the Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism (Manchester University Press, 2000) and Women and Fascism (Routledge, 1998).

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Lisa El Refaie is Senior Lecturer in German at Plymouth University. She is currently conducting a research project, funded by the British Academy, on ‘Editorial Cartoons and Geopolitical Perceptions’. Her recent publications include articles in the journals German Life and Letters, Journal of Pragmatics and Visual Communication. Michael Elm studied sociology and education at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is a scholarship holder of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation. He is writing his Ph.D. on ‘Holocaust and Film’ with a special focus on the depiction of eyewitnesses in feature films and documentaries. He is also editing a book on antisemitism among the German left, scheduled for publication in December 2005 by Metropol Verlag, Berlin. Gerry Gable, who has a M.A. in criminology, has been Adjunct Professor at Syracuse University in New York, teaching practical journalism. Since 1964 he has developed a series of anti-fascist research projects and publications in Britain under the title Searchlight. He has also worked in television as an investigative reporter. He is an independent advisor to the Metropolitan Police and has been a special investigator for the European Parliament. Michael Hagemeister is Lecturer in East European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. His research interests include Russian philosophy, and utopian and apocalyptic thought. He is currently preparing an anthology of bio-political Utopias in Russia and a monograph on Sergei Nilus and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Francis King is a researcher in Russian and Soviet history at the University of East Anglia. His most recent investigations relate to the development of regional healthcare programmes (so-called zemstvo medicine) in Karelia and Samara between 1864 and 1914. Andreas Klärner is a researcher at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He is currently conducting a sociological fieldwork study on right-wing extremism in eastern Germany, and has published a study of German discourse on immigration entitled Aufstand der Ressentiment: Einwanderung und Einwanderungsdiskurs in der BRD und die Kampagne der CDU/ CSU gegen die Reform des Staatsbürgerschaftsrechts (Cologne, 2000). Tanya Lokshina is Chair of DEMOS, and North Caucasus researcher with the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. She has

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published widely on media representations of the conflict in and around Chechnia, and is a frequent spokesperson on Chechnia for such bodies as the Council of Europe, the United Nations and the American Helsinki Commission. Other research interests include racism, xenophobia and intolerance in contemporary Russia. James Miller is Professor of Communications at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he chairs the European Studies programme. His investigations of media in North America and Europe have appeared in such journals as Media, Culture and Society. He was a Fulbright researcher based in Paris and has chaired the annual international Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. Chana Moshenska works at the Sussex University Centre for GermanJewish Studies, researching the diaspora experiences of Jews and ethnic Germans in southern Poland. Her interests include the British far right, Holocaust denial on the Internet, and the life stories of refugees reflected in memoirs and diaries. She teaches courses on representations of the Holocaust and Holocaust education in schools. Bo Petersson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lund University. His special interests include identity constructions, boundary dynamics, stereotyping, nationalism and xenophobia, with reference to Europe, Russia and Central Asia. His publications include National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia (Aldershot, 2001) and Identity Dynamics and the Construction of Boundaries (Lund, 2003, with Eric Clark). Stella Rock completed a doctorate in Russian religious history at Sussex University, before focusing on the role of Russian Orthodoxy in postSoviet nationalist discourse as AHRB Fellow on the Nationalist Myths and Modern Media project. In addition to journal publications, she has contributed to the Cambridge History of Eastern Christianity. Her Popular Religion in Russia: ‘Double-belief ’ and the Making of an Academic Myth is forthcoming from RoutledgeCurzon. Antje Schuhmann is Assistant Professor in American Cultural Studies at the University of Munich. She works as an activist and researcher in the fields of anti-racist feminism, critical whiteness and nationalism. Her next publication will be ‘Terrorizing Whiteness: Conflicting Masculinities and National Politics of Belonging in Recent Western Representations of War’

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in Mediated Terrorism: Readings in Theory, ed. Anandam P. Kavoori and Todd Fraley (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). John Theobald is Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Southampton Institute. His publications include The Paper Ghetto: Karl Kraus and Anti-Semitism (1996), Relocating Germanness: Discursive Disunity in Unified Germany (2000, with P. Stevenson), The Media and the Making of History (2004) and Radical Mass Media Criticism: A Cultural Genealogy (2005, with D. Berry). Edward Timms, Research Professor in History at the Sussex University Centre for German-Jewish Studies, is the author of Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, published in two volumes as Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (1986) and The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (2005). He has been awarded the Austrian State Prize for History of the Social Sciences and made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to scholarship. Alexander Verkhovsky is a director of the SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis in Moscow, which researches ethno-nationalism and methods of counteracting it, problems related to religion in civil society, and anti-democratic trends in contemporary Russia. He is the author of Politicheskoe pravoslavie (Moscow, 2003), and co-author of several books on nationalism and radical groups in Russia. Michael Whine is the Communications Director of the Community Security Trust and Director of the Defence and Group Relations Division of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. He is a Consultant to the European Jewish Congress and represents it at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Sergei Zassorin is Associate Professor in History at Moscow State Pedagogical University. His most recent publications are ‘Human and Ethnic Minority Rights in an Emerging Political Culture in Russia’ in The Public. Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, vol. 7 (2000) and ‘Simvolika v politicheskoi kul’ture sovremennoi Rossii’ in Tetradi Mezhdunarodnogo universiteta v Moskve, no. 2 (2004).

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INDEX OF NAMES

Adenauer, Konrad, 121 Adorno, Theodor, 166 Aleksandr Nevskii, 12, 258 Alekseii II, Patriarch, 11, 192, 194, 197, 229, 230–1, 233, 235, 237, 240, 266 Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress (Tsarina), 12, 248, 259–61, 263–5 Amvrosii (Iurasov), Archimandrite, 231 Anderson, Benedict, 163 Andreev, Daniil, 252 Andronnikov, Prince Mikhail, 263 Albright, Madeleine, 112 Allen, Gary, 33–4 Assmann, Aleida, 112 Augstein, Rudolf, 142 Baal Shem Tov, 168 Baker, Jeffrey, 35 Balashov, Dmitrii, 247 Ballard, Paul, 74 Barnbrook, Richard, 92 Baron, Alexander, 77 Barruel, Abbé Augustin, 32 Barthes, Roland, 262, 265 Bartholomew I, Patriarch of Constantinople, 237 Bauer, Yehuda, 153 Beackon, Derek, 88 Beam, Louis, 31 Bean, John, 85–6 Beauclair, Robin, 70

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Becker, Jonathan A., 42–3 Begunov, Iurii, 247 Benoist, Alain de, 125, 127 Berezovskii, Boris, 199 Beria, Lavrenti, 225–6 Bielecki, Jan, 136 Billig, Michael, 99 bin Laden, Osama, 4, 60–1, 63, 65 Birdwood, Jane, 69, 73–4 Blair, Tony, 4, 61 Blavatskaia, Helena, 252 Boggan, Steve, 92 Bollinger, Lee, 49 Brekhus, Wayne, 99 Brezhnev, Leonid, 223 Browning, Christopher, 154 Browning, William, 73 Bruck, Peter, 182 Bruguera, Sergi, 179 Bubis, Ignaz, 134 Bukharin, Nikolai, 248 Burke, Edmund, 58 Bush, George (senior), 16, 34 Bush, George W., 2, 20–2, 24–5, 63–4, 112–13 Butz, Arthur. 69–70, 73 Campbell, Nicky, 62, 64–5 Carey, James W., 49 Carothers, Thomas A., 44 Carr, William Guy, 36 Carter, Jimmy, 16 Castro, Fidel, 192

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Catherine I, Empress, 258 Chamberlain, Neville, 85 Chamberlain, Walter, 90 Christopherson, Thies, 71 Clinton, Bill, 2, 16–20, 22, 111 Cohn, Norman, 246 Collett, Mark, 91 Collins, Matthew, 91 Cook, Robin, 62–4 Cooper, William, 35–6 Coughlin, Charles, 29, 33 Dahn, Daniela, 119 Dahrendorf, Lord Ralf, 110 Deckert, Joseph, 59 de Gaulle, Charles, 33, 133 Demidov, Ivan, 195 Denikin, Anton, 220 Derrida, Jacques, 168 Derzhavin, Nikolai, 240 Dichand, Christoph, 175 Dichand, Hans, 174–5, 182–4 Dienstbier, Jiri, 136 Dimbleby, David, 62–4 Dmitrii Donskoi, 258–9 Dobrov, Viktor, 226 Dreyfus, Alfred, 60 Dubiel, Helmut, 118–19 Dubin, Boris, 189 Dudko, Dmitrii, 223 Dugin, Aleksandr, 190 Duke, David, 31 Durkheim, Emile, 7, 144, 149 Dzhemal’, Geidar, 237 Edmonds, Richard, 88 Eichberg, Henning (Hartwig Singer), 126, 128, 131 Eichmann, Adolf, 157 Elizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duchess, 262 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 112

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Erhardt, Ludwig, 115 Eschebach, Insa, 168 Fadime (victim of an ‘honour killing’), 101–2 Faurisson, Robert, 71, 73–4, 79 Feit, Margret, 130 Fiore, Roberto, 87 Fischer, Joschka, 8, 111–12, 166, 168 Florenskii, Pavel, 252 Ford, Henry, 2, 28, 31 Franco, Francisco, 29, 266 Frank, Anne, 71 Frank, Otto, 71 Freyer, Hans, 125 Friedländer, Saul, 159 Friedmann, Michael, 170 Fuchs, Franz, 179–80 Gans, Herbert J., 41 Garaudy, Roger, 75 Geissler, Heiner, 131 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 136 Gerashchenko, Viktor, 193 Gerhardt, Volker, 121 Glaz’ev, Sergei, 193, 237 Glazunov, Il’ia S., 12, 247–9 Goebbels, Joseph, 72, 250 Goldhagen, Daniel, 156 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 192 Gorky, Maxim, 248 Grade, Michael, 93 Graf, Jürgen, 79 Gramsci, Antonio, 127 Griffin, Des, 36 Griffin, Nick, 73, 87, 89–91, 93 Grimstad, William, 77 Gromov, Boris, 194 Gross, Peter, 42–3 Grossheim, Michael, 129 Güdemann, Moritz, 59 Guevara, Ernesto (‘Ché’), 8, 151

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INDEX OF NAMES

Guillaumin, Colette, 99 Gusinskii, Vladimir, 199 Habermas, Jürgen, 110–11, 148 Hahn, Otto, 141 Haider, Jörg, 9, 179, 182 Hallin, Daniel C., 50 Hancock, Anthony, 70, 72, 74 Harvey, David, 50 Harwood, Richard (Richard Verrall), 70–1 Hass, Karl-Heinz, 157 Hayden, Nicky, 64–5 Heer, Hannes, 166 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 128 Heinemann, Gustav, 141 Heisenberg, Werner, 141 Heller, André, 181 Hersch, Jeanne, 145 Hess, Ilse, 141–2 Hess, Rudolf, 7, 139–51 Hess, Wolf Rüdiger, 141–2 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 8, 29, 71, 76, 78, 111–12, 114, 133, 140, 154–8, 160, 167, 176, 196 Hoffman II, Michael, 75 Hohmann, Martin, 7, 134–5 Honecker, Erich, 43 Hörbiger, Attila, 176 Hrushevsky, M. S., 217 Hruza, Agnes, 58–60 Huber, Ahmed, 75 Hülsner, Leopold, 58–60 Hussein, Abida, 63–4 Hussein, Saddam, 24, 61, 112–13 Iliukhin, Viktor, 199 Ioann of Kronstadt, 244, 245, 265 Ioann (Popov), Archbishop, 237 Ioann (Snychev), Metropolitan, 247 Irving, David, 5, 70–2, 74, 76, 79, 88, 141

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Isabella I, Queen of Spain, 266 Iurovskii, Iakov, 248 Ivan IV (‘The Terrible’), 223, 257–9, 266 Jäckel, Eberhard, 154 Jansson, Lars, 102–4 Jaspers, Karl, 116 Jeannée, Michael, 177 Jelinek, Elfriede, 9, 176–7, 181, 183–4 Jenkins, Jerry B., 13 Johnson, Lyndon B., 16 Jordan, Colin, 85 Juchem, Wolfgang, 147–8, 150 Jung, Edgar Julius, 125 Jünger, Ernst, 125, 141 Kaczynski, Lech, 130 Kaganovich, L. M., 221, 248 Kalejs, Konrad, 79 Kalinin, Mikhail, 220 Kamenev, Lev, 248 Kandinsky, Vasily, 248 Kantsteiner, Wulf, 155–6 Kara-Murza, Sergei, 197, 219–20, 225 Karaulov, Andrei, 195 Karpov, Vladimir, 224 Kasim, Farid, 75 Kazin, Alexander, 230 Kennedy, John F., 15 Kerensky, Alexander, 220 Kershaw, Ian, 154 Khalil, Muhammad, 78 Kharitonov, Nikolai, 194 Khodorkovskii, Mikhail, 199 Khokhriakov, G., 196 Khrushchev, Nikita, 222, 226 Kilroy-Silk, Robert, 92 Kirill (Gundiaev), Metropolitan , 11, 229, 231, 235–40, 258–9 Kjaersgaard, Pia, 103 Klang, Carl, 34

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Kliamkin, Igor’, 193 Knopp, Guido, 8, 153–61 Koch, Ed, 65 Kohl, Helmut, 6–7, 110, 112, 115–17, 133, 135–6 Korn, Salomon, 134 Kornilov, L. G., 217 Kostiuk, Konstantin, 235 Kovach, Bill, 39–40 Kozhinov, Vadim, 11, 218–20 Kraus, Karl, 3, 14, 57–9, 67 Krebs, Pierre, 125 Kristeva, Julia, 99 Krutov, Aleksandr, 10, 191–2, 194–5, 197 Kun, Béla, 248 Kuniaev, Stanislav, 247 Kunze, Klaus, 127 LaHaye, Tim, 13 Lawrence, Stephen, 70 Lebedev, Valentin, 237 Lefebvre, Archbishop Marcel, 238 Leijonborg, Lars, 103 Lendvai, Paul, 43 Lenin, Vladimir, 33–4, 42, 220, 222, 248 Leonov, Nikolai, 192, 194, 197 Leont’ev, Mikhail, 196 Leuchter, Fred, 69, 72, 76 Liddle, Rod, 87 Lippmann, Walter, 49–50 Lipstadt, Deborah, 5, 74, 79 Longerich, Peter, 154 Lübbe, Hermann, 120 Luxemburg, Rosa, 248 Luzhkov, Iurii, 195 Mahler, Horst, 129 Makashov, Albert, 199 Mann, Golo, 142 Markelov, Mikhail, 193, 195 Marrs, Jim, 36

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Marsden, Victor, 35 Martin, Wolf, 180 Marx, Karl, 33, 36, 248–9 Maschke, Günter, 126, 129 Mattelart, Armand, 56, 67 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 248 McLaughlin, Michael, 71 Men’, Aleksandr, 194, 246 Men’, Mikhail, 194 Mercader, Ramon, 223 Milosevic, Borislav, 197 Milosevic, Slobodan, 112 Mironov, Sergei, 188 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 125 Mohammed, Omar Bakri, 75–6 Möllemann, Jürgen, 169–71 Möller, Horst, 117 Molotov, Viacheslav, 220, 222 Morse, Jedidah, 32 Moseley, Lady Diana, 85 Moseley, Oswald, 85 Mukhin, Iurii, 225–6 Müller, Michael, 145–7 Murdoch, Rupert, 61 Mussolini, Benito, 85 Muster, Thomas, 179 Nazarov, Mikhail, 237 Nenning, Günther, 183 Nevzorov, Aleksandr, 196 Newland, Michael, 92 Nicholas II, Emperor (Tsar), 12, 192, 216, 219, 248, 257, 259–61, 263–5, 267 Niederfrieden, Alina, 174–5 Niekisch, Ernst, 126 Niemoeller, Martin, 141 Nilus, Sergei, 11–12, 243–7, 249 Nimmerrichter, Richard (‘Staberl’), 175, 178–81 Nixon, Richard, 33

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INDEX OF NAMES

Nolte, Ernst, 133–4, 169 Oberlercher, Reinhold, 129 Olga, Saint and Princess, 260 Osborne, John, 122 Oshtrakh, Mikhail, 246 Osipov, Vladimir, 259 Ostergaard, Uffe, 126 Palamarchuk, Petr, 247 Pankratii (Zherdev), Archimandrite, 232 Paul I, Emperor, 257, 265 Pearce, Joe, 87 Pelley, William Dudley, 26 Perle, Richard, 63–5 Peter I (‘The Great’), 223 Peterson, Theodore, 41 Petrov, K., 196 Peymann, Claus, 181 Pierce, William, 31–2 Pike, Albert, 221 Pillai, Nisha, 62 Platonov, Oleg, 11–12, 216–18, 222–3, 247, 260, 262–3, 265 Poliakov, Iurii, 198 Polushin, Andrei, 197 Ponomarenko, P. K., 226 Ponsonby, Teddy, 86 Ponte, Lisa, 64–5 Pushkin, Alexander, 191 Pushkov, Aleksei, 195 Putin, Vladimir, 10, 188, 190, 192–3, 195, 199 Radek, Karl, 248 Raikov, Gennadii, 237 Rainer, Arnulf, 181 Rami, Ahmed, 78 Ramonet, Ignacio, 67 Rasputin, Grigorii, 12, 221, 257–68 Rasputin, Maria, 262 Rassinier, Paul, 73

index.pmd

279

Rathenau, Walter, 111 Reagan, Ronald, 16 Reed, Douglas, 35 Rerikh, Nikolai, 252 Rieger, Jürgen, 142, 144–5 Rizka, Halil, 237 Robison, James, 32 Rockwell, George Lincoln, 30–1 Rogozin, Dmitrii, 193–4, 198 Röhl, Klaus Rainer, 127 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 28 Rosen, Jay, 41 Rosenberg, Alfred, 27 Rosenstiel, Tom, 39–40 Rothermere, Lord (Harold Harmsworth), 85 Rothschilds, the, 34, 36 Rubenstein, Dmitrii, 263 Rudolph, Germar, 74, 78 Russell, Stuart Harling (Phil Edwards), 92 Sahlin, Mona, 103 Salmawi, Muhammad, 78 Sander, Hans-Dietrich, 126, 128 Sargent, Paul ‘Charlie’, 73 Saussy, F. Tupper, 36 Sava, George (George Alexis Bankoff), 257 Savinkov, B., 220 Sawoniuk, Anthony, 79 Scheidemann, Gustav, 114 Schmitt, Carl, 125–8, 131 Schönhuber, Franz, 133 Schröder, Gerhard, 6, 112–13, 115–16, 154, 161 Schudson, Michael, 50 Schüssel, Wolfgang, 178 Sebastian, Tim, 91 Seidl, Alfred, 141, 152 Selezniev, Gennadii, 188

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279

280

NATIONALIST MYTHS AND MODERN MEDIA

Semenko, Vladimir, 234 Serafim of Sarov, 245, 259 Serafinowicz, Szymon, 79 Sereny, Gitta, 79 Sergeev, Aleksandr, 223 Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke, 262 Sergii of Radonezh, 191 Shafarevich, Igor’, 11, 197, 217–18, 222 Shargunov, Aleksandr, 197, 232 Sharon, Ariel, 167, 170 Shenfield, Stephen, 190 Shul’gin, V., 220 Simanovich, Aron, 221 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 244, 252 Soros, George, 44 Sparks, Colin, 42, 44 Splichal, Slavko, 42 Smith, Bradley, 78 Smith, Gerald L. K., 29, 33 Smith, Trevor Malcolm, 74 Stalin, Joseph, 8, 11, 155, 221–6, 248, 258 Steiner, George, 57, 67 Stoiber, Edmund, 122, 135 Stolypin, P. A., 219 Strasser, Otto, 126 Strauss, Botho, 127 Strauss, Franz-Josef, 133 Sukosd, Milos, 42–3 Sviatoslav, Prince, 221 Thatcher, Margaret, 86 Tikhon (Emel’ianov), Archbishop, 231 Tikhon (Shevkunov), Archimandrite, 192, 197, 240 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 198–9 Toben, Frederik, 78 Trost, Ernst, 182 Trostnikov, Viktor, 197

index.pmd

280

Trotsky, Leon, 33, 220–1, 248, 250 Tyndall, John, 73, 86–9 Varela, Pedro, 78 Vasil’ev, Dmitrii, 247–8 Vladimir I, Saint and Prince, 260 Vladimir (Kotliarov), Metropolitan, 230 Vorob’evskii, Iurii, 190 Vranitzky, Franz, 9, 178 Wagner, Bernd, 131 Waldheim, Kurt, 9, 177 Walker, Michael, 87 Walser, Martin, 7, 134, 167, 169 Weber, Max, 150 Webster, Martin, 86–8 Weishaupt, Adam, 32, 36 Weissmann, Karlheinz, 127, 129 Weizmann, Chaim, 133 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 134, 141 Welch, Robert, 33–4 Wessely, Paula, 176–7 Wiesenthal, Simon, 177 Willms, Bernard, 126 Wilson, Woodrow, 19 Winrod, Gerald, 29, 33 Young, James, 163, 168 Zakaev, Akhmed, 211, 213 Zaki, Yakub (James Dickie), 75–6 Zatulin, Konstantin, 197 Zhirinovskii, Vladimir, 11, 190–1, 220–2 Zhdanov, Andrei, 222 Zhilin, Aleksandr, 196 Zinoviev, Gregori, 248 Zitelmann, Rainer, 127, 129 Ziuganov, Gennadii, 194, 198 Zuckermann, Mosche, 122, 164 Zuckmayer, Carl, 141 Zundel, Ernst, 72

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