On China's reunification
The editorial entitled "On the side of Chinese people"
in the March 25 Militant states that "the heart of this
conflict is China's right to national reunification." This is
indeed the heart of the matter, although I question the lack
of any condemnation of Beijing's approach to "reunification."
According to the article on China, Beijing is carrying out
"naval and air force exercises with live ammunition" off the
coast of Taiwan.
The People's Republic of China is a deformed workers' state, and as such cannot be imperialist: it is not driven to military aggression by the need to expand markets or fields of investment. However, the bureaucratic caste that heads the PRC is licking its chops at the impending reunification with Hong Kong, a capitalist bonanza that, under the terms of the 1984 Basic Agreement, will continue with its free-market economy for at least fifty years after 1997.
And the privatizations and joint enterprises with Western capital in the coastal provinces, along with the horrendously anti-labor policies there, should persuade anyone that this ruling caste does not have any great fondness for the interests of Chinese workers and farmers, on either side of the Taiwan Strait.
No one can doubt the intentions of Beijing when it tells Lee Teng-hui not to seek independence and reaffirms its right to reunify by conducting military exercises conveniently timed to run through Taiwan's elections.
China does have the right to reunification, but I doubt that the workers and farmers of Taiwan want it administered with tanks and guns. What they need above all is the political space to engage in the class struggle and test out working-class leaderships. The belligerent moves of Beijing reduce that space considerably.
Adam Wolfe
Evansville, Indiana
Nazi death camps
In a letter in the March 18 Militant, Rick Young takes
issue with a sentence in the article "Don't give NATO what it
hasn't already taken," by Argiris Malapanis (Feb. 19
Militant): "The Nazis won popular support for their openly
stated aims of exterminating Jews and other non-Aryans based
on the smashing of the labor movement."
"The Nazis did not `win' popular support for the death camps," Young writes. "The camps were not openly proclaimed." The exterminations came years later than the smashing of the labor movement, Young says, "in the latter years of World War II"; and the idea that "the extermination of the Jews was done with `popular support' " reinforces the idea of "collective guilt."
Young is right that the idea of collective guilt is wrong. Guilt belongs to the individuals who commit crimes, and the responsibility for Nazi rule belongs to the leaders of the capitalist class that turned over power to the Nazis, knowing full well what they were. But I think that Young falls into several errors in his argument, and that Malapanis's reference to Nazism was right on the mark.
The world war began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland; mass murders of Jews and other Poles began immediately. The death camps began to operate at the end of 1941. The war was two years old at the time and would run another three and one-half years. The extermination of Jews did not begin "in the latter years" of the war, but right at the start.
Nazism was a popular movement, based on the middle class, with a mass following that could be mobilized in their hundreds of thousands. Those who supported the Nazis could have had no doubt what Hitler held in store for the Jews, since he and his Jew-hating predecessors in the German nationalist movement openly proclaimed it.
The mass support did not falter as atrocities against the Jews multiplied. One can say that Hitler won popular support for the murder of the Jews by carrying out crimes against them. Each wave of crimes toughened up the Nazis for a new round of worse crimes.
Hitler did not invent Jew hatred, nor did he originate the idea of murdering the Jews. Before Hitler, there were some 30 years of anti-Semitic propaganda tied to pro- imperialist German nationalism, including comments like "for the Jews the struggle for existence has begun," spoken by the leader of the nationalist Pan-German League on April 13, 1918.
(1)The myth of the "international Jew" was the central theme of all Nazi propaganda, as was the determination to combat this mythical villain ruthlessly. Jews were seen as a race, not a religion, so the task could not be to change them, but to eliminate them.
In Hitler's first public speech, September 16, 1919, he said, "[A]nti-Semitism based on reason must lead to the systematic legal combating and removal of rights of the Jew.... Its final aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether."
(2) The party program (February 24, 1920) proposed taking citizenship from all Jews.
(3) In Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924), Jews are blamed for ruining the German nation through the stock exchange and Marxism; they are blamed for the November 1918 revolution and for the international outlook of the workers' movement in Germany. "The nationalization of the broad masses will succeed only when ... their international poisoners have been exterminated," Hitler wrote.
(4) There was never any question, from the very beginning of Hitler's career, that he would cruelly victimize the Jews. If his words left any ambiguity, the actions of his storm trooper thugs spoke louder than words. Months before the war began, Hitler openly proclaimed his intention to murder the Jews, in a speech to the Reichstag on Jan. 30, 1939; "the consequence [of war]," he said, "will not be the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe."
(5) Although he did not reveal the details of his plans, he announced his aims loudly and unmistakably.
The first thing the Nazis did on seizing power was the task for which the capitalists had chosen them: they utterly crushed the working-class organizations. The Nazis had always been thugs, but they had to crush the working class before their thuggery could become government policy; from that point, there was no force in Germany with the political will to stop their crimes.
They could not have crushed the working class, however, if they were not a mass, popular movement whose supporters believed ardently in the rightness of the crimes they were committing.
The workers' movement is the thin red line that can stand between human civilization and the barbarism that capitalism has in store for us.
It's important to keep our eyes on that red line in Yugoslavia. Malapanis's reference to Germany is on the mark because it's historically accurate, because it shows the consequences of defeat, and because it shows the difference between a defeated working class and one which can still fight.
Tom O'Brien
St. Paul, Minnesota
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