I've been doing some research into the prominent philosophical disputes in the early years of Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR in its German initials). Some of the disputes that became actually political issues and thus part of the history of internal dissent in the DDR seem pretty arcane at first glance. For instance, did Karl Marx derive his dialectical method from Hegel, or did he derive it from his study of Ludwig Feuerbach and other materialist philosophers and then reject Hegel's dialectic based on his own, independently-developed version?
With particular reference to the history of the world Communist movement, Stephen Walt in Birds of a feather: flocking together or flying apart?Foreign Policy Online 10/28/09 suggests that political movements that give a central place to doctrine are particularly subject to splits based on doctrine which may override the pragmatic political common interests that might otherwise be perceived:
Unlike liberalism, which emphasizes the need to tolerate a wide range of political views, political ideologies that rest on a single authoritative interpretation of "truth" are inherently divisive rather than unifying. In particular, ideologies that call for adherents to obey the leadership because it wields the "correct" interpretation of the faith (whether in Marxism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) tend to foster intense rivalries among different factions and between different leaders, each of whom must claim to be the "true" interpreter of the legitimating ideology. In such movements, ideological schisms are likely to be frequent and intense, because disagreements look like apostasy and a betrayal of the faith. Instead of flocking together, these "birds of a feather" are likely to fly apart. [my emphasis]
This is a huge generalization, of course. And it may look banal at first glance.
But it's especially notable because Walt is one of the leading figures in the Realist school of foreign policy thinking. And here, he's pointing to how ideological factors can and do override conventional power politics at times. Realists usually are found emphasizing how generic power considerations are the drivers of the behavior of states much more than their official ideological positions. But the examples Walt gives include cases where he apparently sees doctrine as such throwing around its own weight pretty heavily:
During the Cold War, for instance, hawks repeatedly worried about a "communist monolith" and were convinced that Marxists everywhere were reliable tools of the Kremlin. In reality, however, world communism was rife with internal tensions and ideological schisms, as illustrated by the furious Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the deadly battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and the subsequent rift between Stalin and Tito. China and the Soviet Union became bitter rivals by the early 1960s -- on both geopolitical and ideological grounds -- and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ended another yet another period of illusory communist unity and quickly led to wars between communist Vietnam, communist Kampuchea, and communist China. [my emphasis]
I'm assuming that Walt is pointing here to an interaction between ideology and power politics, in which ideas actually matter to people and to some extent drive events, rather than ideologies being simply tools in the course of political struggles driven by other considerations. I suppose in the case of Communist powers it would be more appropriate to say there is a dialectical interaction between doctrine and power considerations.
In the case of the DDR, both internal and international politics affected the role of doctrine in the political life of the DDR. The Soviet Union insisted in the early years of the Soviet occupation that their German allies emphasize the primacy of Soviet philosophy, especially in the form of Marxism-Leninism as canonized by Stalin. And in Communist governments, not just those within the Soviet orbit, mastery of Communist doctrine was considered important. Communist Party members were expected, along with more prosaic political skills, to know something about Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And for leadership roles, it was necessary to display some proficiency in it. Stalin published philosphical treatises as the leader of the USSR, even including a book on linguistics, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950). The lasting significance of that particular work has proven to be neglible. But it illustrates the extent to which philosophical doctrine played a major role in Communist politics.
So challenges to the official view on even seemingly abstract philosophical issues could be taken as threatening. Partly that was because of the importance of doctrine in Communist politics, so that deviation from the true doctrinal path could genuinely be seen as a threat to the health of the movement. It was also partly because in a society in which competitive democratic politics was forbidden and political orthodoxy was extensively enforced, expression of dissent often had to take the form of seemingly abstract or hair-splitting issues. And empowering a dogmatic view of a prevailing philosophy creates the opportunity for rivals in personal and institutional power struggles to seize on nuances of ideological purity as potentially potent political weapons against their opponents.
A significant part of the history of the democratic movement within Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR after the German initials), has to do with philosophical disputes, which made people like Robert Havemann and Ernst Bloch significant symbols and leaders for those who wanted the DDR to take a more democratic direction. Their role is not as well known as the famous workers' revolt of 1953. But it is important.
In the early years of the Soviet occupation and then the DDR (Communist East Germany), general guidance on the direction and boudnaries of philosophical teaching and publication was set by three journals: Aufbau (1945-1958); Einheit (1946-1990), a Party journal of the SED, the East German Communist Party; and, Neue Welt (1946-1954), an English-language Soviet journal that gave definitive statements of current Soviet thinking on the topics covered.
A literary-philosophical journal called Sinn und Form began publication in 1949 and continues today. The Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (DZfP) under the editorship of Wolfgang Harich began in 1953 also continuing until today was the main professional journal for philosophers in the DDR.
Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995)
As Hans-Christoph Rauh explains in Anfänge der DDR-Philosophie: Ansprüch, Ohnmacht, Scheitern (2001; Hrsg: Volker Gerhardt und Hans-Christoph Rauh), the emphasis in philosophy was on Marxism-Leninism as established by the Soviet Party line. The occupation and the founding of the DDR were during the height of Stalin's power, and his approved version was considered definitive. This is often referred to as Stalinism, though in the context of the philosophical disputes I find the term to be more confusing than helpful. The philosophy of Marx and Engels, known as dialectical materialis - abbreviated among DDR philosophers as "Diamat" - was taken as the fundamental description of society and even all of science. ("Hismat" referred to "historical materialism".) V. I. Lenin was credited with updating Marxism for the age of imperialism, which Lenin dated from the turn of the 20th century with two events in particular, the Spanish-American War and the Boer War. Stalin was said to have achieved the insight that socialism in the age of imperialism could be established in one country, where earlier Marxists had assumed that at least all of Europe would have to make a transition to socialism for the revolution to succeed.
It was more contemporary Soviet versions of Marxism that were taught in East German schools and universities in the early years, with particular emphasis given to Stalin's Foundations of Leninism and a philosophical section of the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short Course which Stalin took credit for writing himself, called Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The actual original texts of Marx and Engels were available but not used so much in the teaching or popularization of the official philosophy.
This reverence for the Marxist-Leninist outlook encompassed not just social theory but the natural sciences, as well. And since physics and other hard sciences had advanced considerably since the 19th century, that presented problems of its own in philosophy. How significant the repercussions were for science and technology themselves in the DDR, I've not seen estimated yet anywhere.
Eugen Karl Dühring (1833-1921) is mainly remembered today because his was the target of intense polemics by Engels in Anti-Dühring and by Friedrich Nietzsche in various places. I've read a couple of articles about Dühring's influence at the time that were interesting enough that I intend to do a separate post about him some time. He was influential in a school of thought known as "national economy". And his influence in the worker's movement was strong enough that Engels felt it necessary to do the series of articles on him that became Anti-Dühring. As the years went on, Dühring became more and more of a sectarian crank and a rancid anti-Semite.
In refuting various theories of Dühring's, Engels made some sweeping claims about the application of dialectical materialism to physical science. He continued that process in a fragmentary work first published in the 1920s as Dialectics of Nature, though portions were published earlier. As it became part of the official canon on which the Soviets were insisting in postwar East Germany, this theory implied among other things the infinite existence of matter. But Einstein's theory of relatively showed that the universe of spacetime did indeed have a limit. A philosophical framework that prevented scholars from fully exploring the theory of relativity had obvious problems. The dogmatic insistence on the applicability of "Diamat" to the natural sciences was problematic in other respects, as well, such as the insistence of a "reflection" theory of knowledge based on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which viewed human knowledge as a strict reflection of objective physical reality.
The heaviness of the hand of official authority appears in a much less abstract way in the editor's declaration in the 4:5(1)/1956 edition of DZfP:
Die Auslieferung des vorliegenden Doppelheftes 5/6/1956 hat sich leider verzogert, da es sich nach der Inhaftierung des früheren Chefredakteurs und Mitherausgebers der Zeitschrift Harich als notwendig erwies, eine neue Redaktion zu bilden und die Arbeitsweise der Redaktion grundlegend zu verändern.
[The distribution of the present double edition 5/6/1956 has been interfered with because after the arrest of the previous chief editor and co-publisher of the journal, [Wolfgang] Harich, it turned out to be necessary to build a new editorial team and to change the work methods of the editorship in a basic way.]
Yes, having the editor imprisoned can cause all sorts of problems with publication!
Die Umbildung der früheren Redaktion war schon seit längerem dringend erforderlich, da Harich als Chefredakteur nicht gewillt war, die Zeitschrift in übereinstimmung mit ihrem ursprünglichen gesellschaftlichen Auftrag zu leiten und zu gestalten. Im Gegenteil, er ver-suchte besonders seit dem Friihjahr 1956 immer offensichtlicher, die Zeitschrift in den Dienst seiner antimarxistischen, revisionistiso.hen und direkt konterrevolutionaren Bestrebungen zu stellen.
[The resructuring of the previous editorial team had already been urgently required for a long time, because Harich as chief editor was not willing to lead and shape the journal in conformity with its original social mission. On the contrary, he attempted, especially since early 1956, ever more openly to place the journal into the service of his anti-Marxist, revisionist and directly counter-revolutionary efforts.]
Further translation: Harich was considered to be too friendly to "reform Communist" efforts like those that were taken to have encouraged the Hungarian revolt of 1956. It was true that in comparison to the prevailing SED line, Harich was more reform-oriented. But he was a Communist, Marxist-Leninist philosopher and remained so decades later when the SED and the DDR came to an end.
This is part of the challenge and the fascination of the history of the democratic movement within the DDR. Few of the activist groups and individual leaders who were prominent in the opposition that lead to the democratic revolution of 1989-90 became immediately prominent in the electoral politics that led to the unification of Germany in the 1990s. Opposition took the form of reform socialist, environmentalist, peace and religious groups. For most people, it seems counterintuitive that committed Communists could have played a major role in reform. But it shouldn't be surprising. After all, Mikail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union was the former head of the KGB and a committed Communist himself. His goal was not to bring down the Soviet Union. It was to reform it and democratize it.
Rolf Hosfeld's Was war die DDR? Die Geschichte eines anderen Deutschland [What was the DDR? The history of another Germany] (2008) is a history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR, or Communist East Germany) from 1945 until 1989. The main focus is on the Walter Ulbricht years from 1945-73. He emphasizes the theme of relations with the Soviet Union.
Hosfeld spells out the fateful response of the Sozialischtische Einheitspartei (SED) - effectively the East German Communist Party - to the famous workers' revolt of July 1953, prompted by the increasing of work quotas which effectively meant a lowering of workers' salaries. That incident was actually far more widespread in the DDR than most observers and historians in the West realized until after the fall of the Wall. It wasn't limited to Berlin; cities all over the DDR were affected by it.
The SED had been trying to squeeze the workers' income to invest in industry and infrastructure. After the uprising, against which the SED found itself unable to proceed effectively was crushed by Soviet intervention, the Party decided that consumer needs must be subsidized sufficiently to prevent a recurrence. The subsidies on food supplies, rent and consumer goods weren't nearly enough to match the standard of living in the West, which was widely known in the DDR. But they were enough to chronically deprive East Germany of the investment that might have made their economy competitive over the long term. They were never able to do so. By 1989, when the Wall fell, the economic infrastructure was in far worse shape than even the most skeptical Western observers generally expected.
Hosfeld's book details various twists and turns in the economic and political changes of SED policy over the four decades of the DDR's existence. It gives a feel for how differences in opinion on economic, political and cultural matters expressed themselves within the limited confines of the SED dictatorship. Hosfeld also discusses the collaboration and disagreements between the SED and the Soviet leadership, which again took place with the confines of Soviet domination.
That is, until 1989 when the Michael Gorbachev basically cut the East German leaders loose. Then-Party-leader Erich Honecker and his supporters were so disturbed at the prospect of political liberalization in the DDR that they began banning Soviet articles on the changes taking place in the USSR.
Hosfeld's history of the democratic opposition in the 1980s is fairly cursory, almost like a postscript. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989.
Der Tod des Demonstranten (Death of the Demonstrator)- a memorial to Benno Ohnesorg by Alfred Hrdlicka, 1971: photo in Berlin 1990
I posted earlier about the story that came out in the German press last week about how Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West Berlin policeman who shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, had been an East German spy and an illegal member of the East German Communist Party (SED) since 1967. Ohnesorg’s death is generally understood as having been a decisive event in spreading the militant German student movement throughout West Germany, when it had been primarily a West Berlin phenomenon prior to that. And the movement in response became even more militant and, in part, violent.
In her blog post Tod von Benno Ohnesorg: Staatsmord aus Ostberlin?, journalist Bettina Röhl Die Welt 22.05.2009 gives some quirky interpretations of the history of that event and its aftermath. I’ve laid out my understanding of the Ohnesorg killing and its repercussions in my earlier post, so I won’t do another overall recap here. She argues that the biggest impetus to the spread and increased militance of the student movement after June 2 was due to the resignations of West Berlin's Mayor and Police President, which signalled to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), i.e., the militant left opposition, that state authorities were weak. In other words, she argues that insufficient authoritarianism by West German officials let the student movement flourish that otherwise could have been restricted.
In doing so, she makes contradictory arguments about the power of the student movement, which she heavily implies was essentially a creation of East Germany. In one place, she argues that the movement would have developed pretty much the way it did, violence and all, without Ohnesorg’s killing. Yet she also argues that if the public had just known then about Kurras' Stasi (East German Security) ties, that the movement couldn’t have gotten any traction from the killing.
But the West German state hardly showed itself to be weak in dealing with protesters, then or later. On the contrary, their training in crowd control was based on a scenario of crowd actions in support of an act of Soviet/East German military aggression against West Berlin. In the situation of the late 1960s, the overly aggressive police tactics had the effect of polarizing the situation in university cities all over West Germany, including conservative Bavaria. The Ohnesorg killing became a symbol of that, but it became a symbol because police excesses were real.
"Enteignet Springer" (Expropriate Springer) became a popular slogan of the student movement shortly after Benno Ohnesorg's death
Her self-contradicatory argument that the APO would have been undercut by the immediate knowledge that Kurras was a Stasi agent is essentially based on the notion that the APO admired the East German version of socialism, which for the most part wasn’t really the case. APO activists expressed solidarity with protest movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia and were generally critical of East German "Stalinism“. She also ignores the ham-handed pugnacity of Social Democratic Mayor Heinrich Albertz in the immediate wake of the killing, as well as the hysteria of the Springer press. On the latter, she is explicitly in denial, writing that they were "die einzige, die damals einen kühlen Kopf bewahrte" (the only ones who kept a cool head back then). That’s imaginative, for sure, but it‘s astonishing revisionism that could only be defended by defining "cool head“ as something like "recklessly irresponsible“. (Die Welt was then and is now a Springer paper.)
Her post also carries a tone of what we in America would call "culture war" polemics, i.e., she still wants to discredit the DHF's (darn frigging hippies, in the nice version) of those days while imagining that their malign influence is present all over the place in present-day German culture. She talks, for instance, about the "die 68er-Ideologen und auch das gigantische Millionenheer der Mitläufer von 68" (the Sixties ideologues and also the gigantic army of millions of fellow-travelers of the Sixties) who are supposedly resistent to facts about that period. DFH's, in other words. And historians of the period who don't share her dismissive atitude toward the DFH's are acting as "security guards" to protect some DFH conventional wisdom about the 1960s.
Having fairly recently read a number of accounts of the period - not least of them Röhl's own highly informative book on the subject, which shows a level of care in narrative and analysis that is missing in her blog post - I don't know who she may be talking about there. I've reviewed here two 2008 books on "1968" by leading German historians Norbert Frei and Götz Aly. Neither strikes me as some DFH ideological position paper. On the contrary, most of the analysis I've seen from German writers on that period seem to take a critical view of events, especially on the ideology and practice of violence.
Röhl also paints with a very broad brush in her post when she writes:
Indes war die Propaganda der APO eine ganz durchsichtige Angelegenheit: Die 68er-Bewegung, die damals noch APO-Bewegung hieß, baute auf dem Tod von Ohnesorg ihre Legende auf, dass der Staat derjenige war, der zuerst Gewalt angewendet hätte, auf die die friedliche Massenbewegung nur reagiert habe.
[In this way, [Ohnesorg's shooting] was a very obvious opportunity for the propaganda of the APO. The Sixties Movement, when then was still called the APO Movement, built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence, to which the peaceful mass movement only reacted.]
Here she seems to be so intent on denigrating the APO that she manages to simultaneously exaggerate and minimize the significance of the Benno Ohnesorg shooting. Sure, his death became an element of the APO's propaganda. Just as the events of that day became an element of the Springer press' hysterical campaign against the student movement - a cool-headed hysterical campaign, according to Röhl. But it became a widespread symbol for the APO because the image and the context resonated strongly with so many young people given how they saw the police acting.
And I'm not sure what it means to say that the APO "built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence". However emotional a turning point the Ohnesorg may have been for many APO activists, for those among them who advocated some form of political violence, I don't get the impression that "who shot first" was a particularly important question.
Given the notorious role the Springer press in general and the Bild-Zeitung in particular played in inciting fear and hatred against young political activists in the 1960s, there something weirdly ironic about citing Bild's articles on the revelations that Benno Ohnesorg's killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a Stasi agent. But here's one link, Der Ex-Innenminister zum Fall Benno Ohnesorg: War es ein Auftragsmord, Herr Schily? 24.05.2009.
Friederike Dollinger (now Friederike Hausmann) with the dying Benno Ohnesorg, who had just been shot in the head by a West Berlin policeman who was secretly a Stasi agent (June 2, 1967)
I'm really surprised at this one. The West Berlin policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras set off a long wave of violence when he murdered a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. A photo of Ohnesorg bleeding out from his head wound is one of the most famous images of recent German history. It was a crucial turning point in the student movement in West Germany.
Now the 81-year-old Kurras is admitting that he was a secret member of the East German Communist Communist Party (SED) and spied for East Germany!
Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009 reports that Kurras initially denied it last week when documents from the archives of the Stasi (East Germany secret police) were published showing his role. But now he admits it straightforwardly. He denies getting paid for his spying, though. Höll reports that a new charge against Kurras over the shooting of Ohnesorg is unlikely, since he was acquitted in two trials related to the killing already. He also reports that there is no indication that the Ohnesorg shooting was somehow ordered by East Germany.
Whether or not those trials were genuinely fair ones from the victim's viewpoint, it's clear that there was no good reason for Kurras to shoot Ohnesorg to death. The incident took place after the second of two demonstrations against the Shah of Iran, who was paying a state visit to Germany. There was a politically active community of pro-democracy Iranian dissidents in West Germany who were highlighting the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. One of them was a young intellectual named Bahman Nirumand who had fled Iran in 1965 and had published a book in 1967 called Persien: Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der freien Welt [Persia [Iran]: Model of a developing country or the Dictatorship of the Free World]. Nirumand criticized the support of the Western democracies for the Shah's brutal government, and his book was one of the most influential books for the activist German students of the 1960s.
Stasi expert Helmut Müller-Enbergs on discovering the Kurras Stasi files: "Ich bin vom Stuhl gefallen." ("I fell out of my chair.")
The German authorities had made a spectacularly ill-advised decision to allow a group of thugs run by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, to act as guards to the Shah. During a peaceful demonstration during the daytime of June 2, the SAVAK thugs had attacked a few hundred anti-Shah demonstrators while the Berlin police looked passively on and let it happen. Then the police moved in themselves against the student demonstrators, arresting some of them but none of the SAVAK attackers.
This raised the emotional temperature for a second demonstration already planned that evening outside the Deutsche Oper, where the Shah and his wife were attending a performance of Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The demonstrators were more militant, and a few tomatoes and paint balloons flew, injuring no one but embarassing the Berlin officials. Erich Duensing, the chief police official (president), had directed the police to proceed aggressively against the demonstrators, beating them with clubs (men and women alike) and firing water cannons at them, like in the infamous photos from Birmingham, Alabama, of a few years before. The demonstrators were in full flight when Kurras shot Benno Ohnesorg in the back of the head in a parking garage.
Ohnesorg was a 26-year-old literature student who apparently wasn't taking part in the demonstration at all. Nor was he armed or threatening the police in any way. The reaction was intense. Part of the problem, aside from the bad judgments of the moment by German officials and police, was that the Berlin police weren't really trained to deal with street demonstrations at that time. Their training for emergency situations was predicated opposing street actions coordinated with a Soviet invasion of the city. Which also meant that city officials were also pretty clueless about how to respond to such an event as the Ohnesorg shooting. So the Social Democratic Mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, said the demonstrators were to blame for the death, adding, "Die Geduld der Stadt ist am Ende." (The patience of the city is at an end.") Not especially diplomatic in a situation where a cop has just made a very questionable fatal shooting, in a situation that was already tense because of blatant police misconduct.
This video shows the report on the German channel ZDF about the Kurras revelations, including footage of the fatally wounded Benno Ohnesorg with Friederike Hausmann:
The Springer press empire, which included the sensation-oriented Bild-Zeitung, accused the demonstrators of acting like Hitler's SA Brownshirts back in the day. Bild on the day after the Ohnesorg murder declared, "In Berlin gab es bisher Terror nur östlich der Mauer. Gestern haben bösartige und dumme Wirrköpfe zum erstenmal versucht, den Terror in den freien Teil der Stadt zu tragen." ("In Berlin up until now, there was Terror only east of the Wall. Yesterday, malicious and dumb crazies attempted for the first time to bring Terror into the free part of the city.") Again, it was the demonstrators they were accusing of Terror, not the police and the SAVAK thugs. A particularly awkward comparison to place against state terror in Communist East Berlin. And even more ironic in retrospect, knowing now that the killer was an East German agent.
Protests grew against the police and the Springer press, as well. Within a few weeks, the slogan "Enteignet Springer!" (Expropriate Springer!) became popular among left-leaning student demonstrators. It's generally assumed among German historians that the killing of Benno Ohnesorg touched off "1968" or "the Sixties" in West Germany, insofar as that meant a mass political movement among the young (though it was not only young Germans who were outraged by the Ohnesorg shooting). As historian Norbert Frei describes it in 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (2008), the fate of Benno Ohnesorg, shot down by a cop because he looked like a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was one in which it was easy for many students to imagine themselves.
The shooting didn't create the student or youth movements, they were already under way. But, referring to the SDS, the leading militant political group among German university students (not to be confused with the American SDS of the same time), Frei writes that at their national conference in Frankfurt a few weeks later, "nobody was talking about tomatoes any more." The Ohnesorg shooting marked a militant and violent turn in the student movement.
Wolfgang Kraushaar writes in Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009 that Ohnesorg's death was "the spark that ignited the student revolt". There had been something like a student revolt at the Freie Universität in West Berlin before that, he writes, but the Ohnesorg killing and the general official misconduct around the demonstrations on June 2 created such a shock and outrage among univerisity students and other young people that activism took off among them all over West Germany.
Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi agent and killer of Benno Ohnesorg, in 1967
When Karl-Heinz Kurras was acquitted on November 21, 1967 of murder in the Ohnesorg case, the chief judge in the case indicated that he was unhappy with the outcome of the case in words that retroactively take on a new meaning in light of the revelations that Kurras as an East German spy: "Kurras weiss mehr, als er sagt, und er macht den Endruck, als wenn er in vielen Dingen die Unwahrheit sagt." ("Kurras knows more than he's saying, and he gives the impression that he is speaking falsehood in many things.") The judge was more perceptive than he knew.
Despite Kurras' acquital, both police president Erich Duensing and Mayor Heinrich Albertz wound up resigning their posts after the details of the Ohnesorg killing became public.
According to Höll's report, Kurras provided intelligence reports to East Germany on the West German police and the West German Verfassungsschutz, an internal security agency. The Stasi reduced their contacts with him after the Ohnesorg murder. But the files show a Stasi contact as late as 1976. He provided information to the Stasi about East German refugees and planted microphones in offices. He wasn't just passing on office gossip.
I hate to speculate. But who can resist speculating about a spy story? One obvious speculation is that the East Germans could have put him up to shooting somebody at that demonstration to cause trouble. Or, he could have seen himself as a convinced Communist - which he presumably did if he wasn't taking money for his information - a made a similar calculation on his own, although that seems more far-fetched. But there's apparently no evidence of either, so far.
Then it's always possible that the West German authorities somehow greased the skids for Kurras' acquitals on charges related to the Ohnesorg murder because he was working as a double agent, or because they were secretly aware of his spying activities and were using him to feed misinforation to the Stasi. But there is no evidence in the public record of that either, so far as I know.
Still, it is a remarkable coincidence that a policeman whose shooting of student played such a key role in the politics of West Germany in the 1960s turns out to have been a secret Communist and a spy for East Germany!
Kraushaar recalls something I don't recall seeing described before. Benno Ohnesorg's funeral procession of over 100 cars had to pass through East German territory to get from West Berlin to Hannover, where he was buried. Normally, the East German officials required cars to wait for hours to pass. The funeral convoy was waved through. Along the way, young people greeted the convoy along the highway, and East German soldiers along the route even paid honor to the deceased. As Kraushaar says, these unusual occurences looked like an act of state by the East Germans. At a minimum, it meant that East Germany wanted to make the incident as much of a pain as they could for the West German government. Kraushaar cautions that this is not to say that it was some kind of genuine act of solidarity by the East Germans. The leaders of the East German SED regime generally weren't interested in the "anti-authoritarian" goals of the western student movement except as it further their own state goals. Some twenty years later, they were rejecting Michael Gorbachev's brand of reform Communism as way too liberal for their liking.
But he also cautions that there is no evidence of an East German order to Kurras to shoot somebody. And he warns that we may never know. Since Kurras is still alive and apparently lucid, he himself could reveal for the first time what his motive in the killing was. But, as Kraushaar notes, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so by talking openly about his motives, Kurras could open himself to another prosecution on the Kurras killing. So it's unlikely to happen.
Uwe Holmer's story is one of those in in the book that particularly caught my attention.
Holmer was a veteran of the Second World War. After his wartime experiences, he resolved to always follow his conscience in the future. He began studying theology in Jena in 1948. Religion was not formally welcomed in Communist East Germany (the DDR). But it was grudgingly tolerated, though church members had some serious personal restrictions placed upon them, at some periods of the DDR's history more burdensome than others.
Holmer soon became an active promoter of the Protestant Junge Gemeinde, the church youth organization which the ruled SED (Communist Party) saw as a competitor to the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization.
Because Holmer was an early internal opponent of the SED regime, he gained attention at the highest levels.
Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker became the top leader of the DDR - First Secretary of the SED - in 1971, General Secretary in 1976, when he also became formally the head of state (Chairman of the State Council, or State Soviet if you prefer). He was also in charge of planning and building the Berlin Wall. But in 1946-55, he was head of the FDJ. So Holmer came to his attention early.
Margot Feist (born 1927) became Erich's second wife. She became a senior official in the im Ministerium für Volksbildung (Ministry of Education) in 1955, two years after her marriage to Erich. (Their daughter Sonja was born in 1952, when Erich was still married to his first wife Edith.) Margot became deputy minister for Education in 1958, and Minister of Education in 1963, in which role she served until a week before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the DDR was coming completely undone. (The Wall was opened on Nov. 9, 1989.) She herself did not have a college education. (For more on the First Lady of the DDR, see Margot Honecker: Die meistgehasste Frau der DDRDie Welt 16.04.2007.
Margot Honecker
According to Huber, Margot Honecker personally made sure that none of the Holmers' ten children were allowed to attend university or enter an Abitur program, the latter being the college-track high school education in American terms (more-or-less).
Holmer also attracted the unfavorable attention of the authorities by his solidarity with farmers who were unwillingly being forced into collectivized farms.
Honecker found himself forced to resign his leadership position in the DDR in October 1988, when the opposition movement was in full swing and the DDR was seeing its possibilities of survival rapidly decreasing. In January 1990, Honecker at age 77 was arrested on charges of corruption and abuse of office, but held only one day because of his poor health.
But his fellow Party members didn't want him and Margot to keep living in their home in a neighborhood where many other SED members lived. The Evangelical [Protestant] church agreed to give him a place to live.
And the place he would up living was in Lobetal, near Berlin - with Uwe Holmer and his family. They lived there for just over two months, from January 31 to April 3, when Erich went back to the hospital. During their time with the Holmers, they attracted occasional protests, and there were a couple of times they all had to evacuate the house due to bomb threats. But otherwise, their stay was uneventful. Their daughter Sonja came by to visit them regularly bringing groceries and a newspaper.
Huber writes:
Mit den Worten der Bibel hatte Holmer es stets genau genommen. Vergebung war ein zentraler Wert seines christlichen Glaubens, und davon war kein Mensch auszunehmen. Auch nicht die Honeckers, die ihm beide viele Jahre lang das Leben schwergemacht hatten. "Hier braucht ein Mensch Hilfe, dem können wir uns nicht versagen. Jesus hätte ihn auch nicht abgewiesen." Doch es war auch die Freude über die politische Wende, die Uwe Holmer für diese Geste stark gunug machte. Der Pfarrer und seine Familie zögerten nicht, das berühmteste Ehepaar der DDR bei sich aufzunehmen.
[Holmer had always taken the words of the Bible literally. Forgiveness was a central value of his Christian faith, and no person was excluded from that. Not even the Honeckers, who had made life hard for both of them for many years. "Here a person needed help, we couldn't fail him. Jesus would also have not have turned him down." But it was also the joy over the political change that made Uwe Holmer strong enough for these guests. The minister and his family did not hesitate to accept the the most famous married couple of the DDR.]
I picture it as like being asked to have Dick Cheney and his wife Liz stay in your guest room while they are waiting for Saudi Arabia or Paraguay or somewhere to approve their request for asylum. I just don't think I'm that good of a Christian. It would take a road-to-Damasacus type vision to get me to that point, I'm afraid.
Holmer talks about the Honeckers' stay in this interview, Frau Honecker schickt noch Briefe by Marijke Engel Berliner Zeitung 28.01.2000.
Uwe Holmer in more recent years
The Honeckers were later flown to Moscow, where they became no longer welcome guests after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1992, they were returned to then-unified Germany, where Honecker was again arrested on charges of ordering border guards to shoot to kill when people tried to escape the DDR borders. But again he was released on grounds of poor health. He joined Margot and Sonja in Chile, where he died in May 1994 of liver cancer.
Margot is still alive. She still lives in Chile. She was invited to Nicaragua in 2008, which she was honored with the Reuben Dario Prize for the "independence of culture". It was her first appearance in a public function since she arrived in Chile in 1993.
According to Huber, the Holmer still receives letters from her occasionally. In the 2000 Berliner Zeitung article linked above, he says Margot writes at least every Christmas.
One of the opposition activists Huber describes is Vera Lengsfeld. As Huber puts it, Lengsfeld set out to undertake seemingly everything in "dem Verbotskatalog der DDR: ausserparlamentarische Opposition, Gruppenbildung, Anfertigen einer Zeitung, Gründung eines Veriens oder einer Partei, Veröffentlichung eines Buches" (... the DDR's catalog of the forbidden: extra-parliamentary opposition, formation of groups, preparation of a newspaper, founding of a club or a party, publication of a book).
Lengsfeld's background was different from most dissident activists in that her father was a senior officer of the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the secret police). She herself was able to attend university, where she studied philosophy. Born, in 1952, she joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, e.g., the Communist Party) in 1975 out of conviction.
During her activist days in the DDR, she was married and went by her married name Wollenberger. After the fall of the DDR and the Stasi's files were opened, she discovered that her own husband had been an IM (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, i.e., spy) reporting on her to the Stasi. The marriage didn't last. She went back to her maiden name.
She became a dissident in the 1980s, when she had three children. Her father had to agree to have no contact to her and her mother asked her to stay away. Her emphasis in her work was on environmentalism, which was a major concern in the seriously industrially-polluted DDR, and for personal civil liberties. She co-founded the Pankower Friedenskreises (Pankow Peace Circle) in Berlin, which was one of the more significant opposition groups in the 1980s.
She was eventually arrested in 1988 for taking part in a state-sanctioned annual march honoring the martyred German Communist leaders Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Some opposition groups decided to participate, bringing their own unapproved signs. As did Lengsfeld, who the Stasi shortly before had characterized as one of the 60 "fanatischen und unbelehrbaren Feinde des Sozialismus" (most fanatical and incorrigible enemies of socialism). She was arrested, held in prison for a month, then expelled to Britain, where she settled in Cambridge.
While moving to England was a fate many East Germans might have welcomed, leaving one's home and family and friends behind isn't an easy thing. Plus, many of the opposition activists wanted to reform the DDR itself. Lengsfeld was one of them. She, like other activists, advocated a form of "reform communism" or a "Third Way" between the old Soviet-style model and Western capitalism. In fact, there was some tension between those who actively sought to emigrate to West Germany and the Third Way activists who wanted to stay in the DDR and democratize it, though both groups had common interests in resisting the SED government.
Lengsfeld actively sought to return to the DDR, which she was able to do on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was first opened. She returned that very day to rejoin the activist opposition. But she found herself out of touch over the next few months with the rapidly-developed public demand for unification with western Germany, which formally occurred in October, 1989.
Huber describes how she gave a speech in Leipzig that year at the beginning of the Christmas season (which starts much nearer to December 25 in Germany than it does in the US!). She was heckled a bit during the demonstration as she talked about reforming the DDR, apparently not because the hecklers were defending the system but because they though her Third Way talk was not about unification with the rest of Germany. During that speech, Huber writes, "erfasste Vera Lengsfeld, wie wenig das Modell einer selbständigen, sich demokratisierenden DDR bei der Menge auf Gegenliebe stiess" (recognized how little positive reception her model of an independent, democratized DDR found among the audience).
She was elected the following year as a member of the one and only freely-elected DDR parliament, whose main task was to approve the dissolving of the DDR and the incorporation of the eastern states into the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD, previously "West Germany").
Vera Lengsfeld, circa 2008
But her later career in unified Germany didn't take the road of becoming a permanent Green Party activist, or a Social Democrat, or a member of the SED's successor party, the PDS (now merged into the Left Party). Instead, she served from 1990 to 2005 as a Member of Parliament, until 1996 affiliated with the Greens. Then she switched to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), today's Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.
And along with it, she become pretty much of a reactionary, it appears. She decided that the principle of equality - one of the basic "bourgeois" principles as in the "freedom, equality and brotherhood" of the French Revolution - leads directly to Stalinist Communism. Since various forms of that basic principle are defended by all the five parliamentary parties in Germany, that's a pretty extreme and eccentric position. Her Web site today features the "libertarian"-type slogan, "Freiheit and Fairness statt Gleicheit und Gerechtigkeit" (freedom and fairness instead of equality and justice).
Explicitly opposing the equality and even justice in general is, it's safe to say, a pretty unusual position. (Maybe she absorbed more of her father's Stasi values than she realized.)
And her concern for the environment seems to have, uh, slipped a bit. Of the 19 links she features on her Web site as of this writing, three are from climate-change denial sites, one of them sneering at the "fabrizierte Klimakatastrophe" (manufactured climate crisis) and no small-g green sites, it seems. From defying the East German Communist government over ecological activism in the 1980s to climate-change denial today. Wow!
In fact, from her list of Web links, she pretty much a dogmatic libertarian, which in German terms would be a "rightwing liberal", a concept which just doesn't translate in American political terms. "Free-market zealot" is probably the closest you could come. (But that's not that good a translation, either.) She says in the "links" section of her Web site that her favorite magazine is Novo. In the most current issue featured at Novo's Web site, the chief editor explains that the current world financial crisis was not caused by "neoliberalism" (free-market deregulation), but rather by too much regulation.
But still, she was one of many who fought for democratic rights in the DDR. And it's not surprising that she first affiliated with the Green Party. The Greens were the party in West Germany that was most emphatic about expressing solidarity with the democratic movements in East Germany. But she seems to have wound up today with her head stuck in some kind of ultra-conservative doctrine that would make her right at home with the Sarah Palin fans in America. Weird.
Florian Huber has written a companion volume to a German documentary series on the former East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR from its German name): Meine DDR: Leben im anderen Deutschland [My DDR: Life in the other Germany] (2008).
The "my DDR" part of the title reflects the approach of the book, which is to tell the 40-year story of the DDR (founded 1949, dissolved 1989) by following portions of the lives of a wide variety of DDR citizens, some famous, others not. There is Janet Oldinski, who was looking forward to a career and life as a citizen in the DDR, who was no dissident. In July 1989, she was in an autobile accident and was in a coma for months. When she was able to refocus on the outer world and resume her studies in Leipzig, the DDR was in full disintegration. I don't know if her particular story inspired the German comedy film Goodbye, Lenin, whose plot is based on a similar idea.
I found this an interesting and engaging way to relate the general history of Communist East Germany. The country was led by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED), which was technically a fusion party of Communists (KPD) and Social Democrats (SPD) and Christian Democrats, but which functionally was a Soviet-line Communist Party. Well, Soviet-line until Mikhail Gorbachev became the chief Soviet leader. The SED didn't want anythng to do with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Political and economic policies varied over the four decades of the country's existence. Americans have such a comic-book idea of what dictatorships are about that we find it hard to even recognize genuinely dictatorial claims of our own government when they are put forth, e.g., the torture policy, and Cheney's "Unitary Executive" theory. But dictatorships also have to have a social basis to survive for long. And they have to pay attention to public opinion, if only to keep it mostly passively hostile.
Janet Oldinski got a big surprise when she recovered from her coma
Communism as a system of thought had its origins in the radical-democratic movements of the 19th century. Unlike fascism in its German, Italian, Spanish and Austrian variants, which represented a rejection of the whole concept of democracy back to and including the French Revolution. So Communist governments, no matter how authoritarian their actual style of rule, could never forgo either the theory or the outer forms of democracy. And that was also true of the DDR, where the SED was always more resistant than most other "Soviet bloc" countries to reform movements that represented either political liberalization or liberalization in the economy, the latter meaning allowing more capitalist-type businesses.
But in Meine DDR, the reader gets a sense of how elements of democratic thought survived. Organized activity like hiking clubs have long been popular in Germany and Austria, and still are. The DDR provided plenty of those, like the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend), the SED's youth organization that not only provided the best outlet for young people for sports and organized social events like dances. It was also a virtual prerequisite for being able to get a university education. So the FDJ gave young people experience in interacting in an organizational context. But it also was a primary instrument for non-violent coercion of the population to conform to the official policy of the SED regime. The SED didn't have to hold a gun to people's heads to get compliance, though obviously "non-violent coercion" is not the same as freedom.
Huber provides a great quote from SED head Walter Ulbricht, the main leader of the DDR during its first two decades, at the time they were preparing to formally establish the DDR on Soviet orders: "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)
Janet Oldinski circa 2003
And the stories in Meine DDR show some of the many ways they attempted to maintain this policy until the very end.
(Not to draw forced analogies. But don't kid yourself. Dick Cheney's notion of government can pretty much be summed up with the same quotation.)
In days where the American Republicans have just led the most massive nationalizations ever undertaken outside the Communist world, it's probably worth noting the difference between nationalization of the social-democratic and (current) American Republican Party type, and expropriation. The current financial bailout in the US and EU countries, like the federal bailout of Chrysler during the Carter administration, involved the government buying all or part of a company. But the companies remain organized as public corporations, and the government shares can be sold to other investors or repurchased, thus re-privatizing those portions of the economy without changing the business form of the companies.
Communist governments have tended to rely on expropriation, which involves the state seizing control of private assets without compensation at current market levels. The best-known case of large-scale expropriation of capital assets in the US, although it's not usually described as such, was the freeing of the slaves by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. That removed the enormous capital investments planters had invested in the physical bodies of the slaves from their possession without compensation. Pre-war emancipation schemes had generally involved some form of "compensated emancipation", i.e., having the government reimburse the slaveowners all or part of their capital investment when slaves were freed. Bob McElvaine, years ago when I was one of his history students at Millsaps College, said that the inflation-adjusted amounts of capital expropriated by freeing the slaves was even larger than the amounts confiscated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
The DDR relied on expropriation and the state ran most of the economic enterprises. Meine DDR is not focused on economics as such. But it does give the reader a sense of the economic issues the DDR faced in competing with the West and in maintaining the SED's political control. For instance, after the workers' uprising of 1953, which quickly spread across the entire country and was kicked off by an increase in production quotas, the SED leadership was always fixated on providing enough consumer benefits to the people to keep them satisfied enough to not repeat the 1953 experience.
SED leader and Communist hardliner Erich Honeker
As we see in Meine DDR in part through the experiences of a not especially ideological young man named Edgar Most, who eventually became one of the most senior finance officials in the country, the SED's economic strategy tended to favor subsides of rents and consumer goods to the expense of vital long-term investments. As time went on, the DDR's inability to compete in the increasingly globalized marketplace became more and more a detriment to the SED's ability to maintain power indefinitely.
Political repression was certainly part of the SED's program of maintaining control, as well. Through media reports and the film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), many people from the Western side of the Cold War have at least heard something about the operations of the Stasi, i.e., the Staatssicherheitsdienst, the secret police. Meine DDR adds more stories to the Stasi's history.
It's not primarily the purpose of Meine DDR to tell the story of the democratic opposition as such. For many citizens, even those who weren't in comas during key months of the final acts of the drama, the breakup of the DDR seemed to come as a sudden event, completely unexpected. Huber gives the reader both a sense of how they experienced it, as well as some idea of how the democratic opposition functioned, especially in the later 1980s. And he writes (my translation):
Die DDR ging nicht an einem bestimmten Tag oder Ort zu Ende. Für jeden ihrer sechzehn Millionen Einwohner wurde der Untergang durch ein anderes Ereignis, Erlebnis oder eine persönliche Entscheidung spürbar. Jeder nahm auf seine Weise Abschied von der eigentumlichen Republik, die langer überlebt hatte, als selbst ihre Grander zu hoffen gewagt hatten, und die sich vierzig Jahre unübersehbar in das Leben jedes Einzelnen hineingedrängt hatte, im Schlechten wie im Guten.
[The DDR did not come to an end on a particular day or place. For every one of its sixteen million inhabitants, its downfall was evidenced by a different occurence, experience or a personal decision. Every person took leave in their own way from the curious Republic, which had survived longer than even its founders had dared to hope. And which for forty years had unmistakably pushed itself into the lives of every single person, for worse or for better.]
But Huber does give us some sense of the democratic opposition, particularly the role that the Protestant Christian churches played in it. Though he doesn't go into great detail about the kinds of issues - peace and disarmament, environmentalism, conscientious objection to military service, emigration - around which they organized.
In another post, I'll comment on two of the more memorable stories from Meine DDR of people who were active in the opposition.
An Australian participant in a Yahoogroups list to which I belong brought up a point this weekend about humanitarian intervention. More specifically, he has always been disturbed in some way about the fact that what he calls "the Left" seemed to be insufficiently outraged about Saddam Hussein's regime's human rights record. Although he's been very critical of the Iraq War and Australia's participation in it, he also argues that Saddam's human right record alone would have been a legitimate cause for war.
And he's sympathetic to calls now for outside intervention to effect "regime change" in Zimbabwe.
Following are some of my (slightly edited) comments which I shared with that group on this general topic.
Fans of invasion and war in Zimbabwe might want to look at the results of "regime change" in Iraq - a million-plus deaths, millions of refugees, sectarian civil war, devastation of the infrastructure, etc. - before they dream up new wars for noble purposes. But then all wars are for noble purposes, aren't they?
American conservative bloggers were cheering the Ethiopian Army when they marched in to Somalia (with American backing) to change the "Islamic Courts" regime that was briefly in power. For a week or two, they were suggesting the US could take lessons from Ethiopia on how to do "regime change". Then that quickly descended into the Ethiopian Army raping and pillaging, and unable to keep order between competing Somali warlords. And the US rockets a Somali village now and then to kill "terrorists". But I'm sure the Ethiopians and Dick Cheney have pure intentions.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for African military actions to cheer for, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is asking European countries to send more troops to the Republic of the Congo to contain a rebellion there that is creating an enormous humanitarian crisis. Or does cheering for war in Zimbabwe mean that you think the people in the Congo just deserve to suffer? Come to think of it, anyone who's not in favor of Australia and the US invading and occupying the Congo to set things right must be a fan of slaughter, starvation and disease! (In case it's not clear in the context, those last two sentences are meant ironically.)
No matter how good the cause, the limits of power on behalf of the intervening nations is still a factor that has to be considered.
War in itself is an evil. Climate change may eventually outdo it. But war has been the greatest source of self-inflicted damage the human race has come up with so far. War should be the last resort. It's never an easy solution. And it's the "solution" with most potential to spin out of control and have destructive effects not anticipated.
It seems to me it's more than a bit of a cop-out to say that we should have overthrown Saddam Hussein on the basis of human rights and not realize that the death and destruction the war has caused is the real-world result of actually overthrowing him. Yes, we can always say that we should have had smarter American viceroys, that we should have kept the Christian cowboys from Blackwater on a shorter lease, and so on.
But in 2003, no matter what the excuse was, the US military had the same deficiency in counterinsurgency warfare, very few Arabic speakers, an enormous dependence on and immense faith in the magic powers of air war, and the same tendency to lie their hineys off whenever something went wrong. We can make up all kinds of fairy tales about how the war might ideally have been. But the basic results wouldn't have been essentially different.
And while things are looking promising for the US to get out of Iraq over the next couple of years, it's still true that it's harder to get out of a war than to get into one. That's as true in southern Africa as it is in Mesopotamia or South Asia. There's likely to be another outbreak of civil war - Arab vs. Kurd, Shi'a vs. Sunni, Shi'a vs. Shi'a - after we leave or while we're leaving Iraq. It will be an immense accomplishment if we can manage to avoid direct intervention by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. All those countries are actually intervening in some way now. Turkey periodically crosses into Iraqi airspace to bomb some Kurds.
International law is also important, as much as today's American Republicans love to sneer at the whole concept. That part of the American tradition most of them seem to dearly despise. And even though the UN General Assembly in 2005 recognized something like a "responsibility to protect" in cases of massacres, there is really no criteria comparable to the legal prohibitions on preventive war. Basically, the UN can declare any situation a "threat to international peace and security". But there are no clear standards for "humanitarian intervention".
And it's also the case that American Republicans always become deeply, passionately concerned about the human rights of political prisoners and the oppression of women - in countries they want to invade. But even the most besotted Republican would find it hard to argue that the social position of women in Iraq is improved over what it was in the Baathist years. It's probably marginally better in Afghanistan than it was before, at least in the capital city of Kabul, which is basically the only place the pro-Western government - which rules under a form of Islamic law, sharia - actually controls. To see exactly how much today's segregationist-minded Republican Party cares about human rights, read up on what's been going on with the lynch-law system they use in Guantanamo and other stations of the Bush Gulag.
Maybe Australian politicians are honest enough that none of them would ever use a humanitarian justification for a war they want to wage for less noble ends. They're lucky if that's the case. It ain't that way in the United States, though. Really not.
I also don't think there's anything hypocritical about being concerned for human rights in some other country while also not being in favor of going to war to rectify the conditions in that country.
During the days of Communist East Germany, the Green Party in West Germany distinguished itself by highlighting the democratic opposition and human rights cases. And that had some real effects in giving the democratic movement more room to act and got some dissidents out of prison or otherwise mitigated their treatment. But the Greens never advocated invading East Germany because, among other things, doing so would have kicked off global thermonuclear war.
The US government under Jimmy Carter (1977-81) made a point of highlighting human rights abuses under the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina in 1976-83. So did international human rights NGOs and other governments whose citizens were "disappeared" by that hateful regime. But no one except Britain went to war with them. And that was over the Malvinas/Falklands Islands, not over human rights. Actually, I think Argentina had and has good claim to the Malvinas. But the dictatorship's defeat in that war was also the final blow to its existence. What was the pure position there? To cheer for the democracy going to war to assert an illegitimate claim to territory? Or to cheer for the dictatorship when they were fighting for something genuinely in their country's perceived interest? But, again, the human rights protest against the regime did make a difference in saving lives and restraining the regime's hand to some extent.
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