Accusation of anti-Semitism as an instrument of power - attack on the left and German hypocrisy

In the Federal Republic of Germany, the election victory of the Left seems to have sparked a competition to see who can come up with the stupidest argument to discredit The Left as a coalition partner with all other parties. The participants do not seem to be able to decide yet whether, in the case of a left-wing government, Sharia law or the Communist Manifesto will be declared the new basic law, whether the youth will be forced to come to school in the burqa or in a latex outfit with a dog mask, whether the supporters of the rainbow ideology will now rewrite all curricula or be thrown from roofs in the future, whether Issa Remmo will actually become interior minister and have all landlords legally shot, or a dual leadership Osama bin Laden and Joseph Stalin have other plans for the left-wing Islamist future of the city. Only one thing seems certain: If the Left governs, Jews will no longer be safe in this city. One might think that Jungle World and Springer-Verlag together made their way to the top of the dpa unnoticed over the weekend. The accusation of anti-Semitism is of course much more serious than those of “gender madness” and communism. Not without reason. In the country where six million Jews were killed and where everyone knows the pictures of the piles of corpses and the survivors from concentration camps after they were liberated by the Red Army, there should be no accusation in the political debate that weighs more heavily. Anyone who uses it on others should therefore know what they are saying. The current debates give the impression that the opposite is the case.Those who throw this accusation around in the most inflationary way today know the least about what they are actually talking about. Or they don't want to know because they exploit the memory of the victims of National Socialism to push their agenda in today's political disputes.

Auschwitz and the universal context of guilt

On April 19, 1945, after the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the survivors' oath was read out: "The final destruction of Nazism is our slogan. Building a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal. We owe this to our murdered comrades and their relatives. As a sign of your readiness for this fight, raise your hand in an oath and repeat after me: We swear!" At this point in time, around 6 million Jews, around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million Polish prisoners, at least 250,000 Roma and Sinti, over 300,000 Serbian civilians, over 250,000 people with disabilities and tens of thousands of political opponents, “asocials”, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and other victim groups had fallen victim to the German policy of extermination. What former AfD leader Gauland described in a speech in the Bundestag as “bird shit in our 1,000-year-old history” was an unprecedented crime on the European continent, the extent of which goes beyond any human imagination. Any attempt to put this horror into words must fail. This is what Auschwitz stands for as a cipher. “All culture after Auschwitz, including the urgent criticism of it, is rubbish,” wrote Theodor W. Adorno at the end of his life, in which he had oriented his entire philosophical work towards a “new categorical imperative”: to “organize thinking and acting in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself, nothing similar happens.”

Vain. Similar things have happened and continue to happen today in the midst of capitalist society. The Buchenwald survivors' ideal of creating “a new world of peace and freedom” has not yet been realized. Adorno was well aware of this when he spoke of this society as a “universal context of guilt”: “The guilt of life, which as a pure fact already takes the breath away from other life.” One of his students, Detlev Claussen, updated this judgment for our time: "The new world order after 1989 has created a simultaneously effective new international division of labor from the nations that developed at the same time, which condemns over a seventh of the world's population to daily hunger. We are all guilty of this global death sentence - with every piece of bread we eat, with every sip of water we drink." Civil society is built on this global death sentence, declaring itself the best of all worlds. The consequences of climate change hit those who are hungry first. The poor will provide the corpses for the coming wars. Meanwhile, profits grow from both for the ruling class. The current fascination also serves them to break any possible resistance to this order.

We are the good guys

In the ideological self-image of the German bourgeoisie, they don't want to know anything about such things. Precisely because of the past, a slip to the right and a slip to the left, the right lessons have finally been learned from history in this country with the free-democratic basic order. We are the good guys! The “dirty work” (Friedrich Merz) of maintaining this freedom is done for us by the others, the US empire in its next wars for democracy, the IMF and some warlords to secure our supply of raw materials, or the Libyan coast guard and various torture henchmen to secure our borders. Long live the social market economy! And of course today's militarization is completely different than in the distant, dark past. While our ancestors were twice as stupid as to fall for the indoctrination of their ruling class and go to war under false pretexts, today's Federal Republic has long since overcome such class differences. It's about nothing less than standing shoulder to shoulder with the management of Rheinmetall to defend freedom against the evil Russians. Really this time!

The amount of repression required to maintain this self-perception is considerable. In the Federal Republic of Germany it begins on day 1 after the liberation from National Socialism. While communists, social democrats and trade unionists were the first victims of the mass arrests under National Socialism, German capital profited diligently between 1933 and 1945 through forced labor, “Aryanization” and war production, after helping the NSDAP come to power to combat “Jewish Bolshevism”. Regarding the following "break" between National Socialism and the Federal Republic of Germany, historian David de Jong comments: "The denazification of Germany is a myth. It never happened. There was a transfer of money and power from Nazi Germany to West Germany and to a certain extent also in East Germany, because former SS officers became high-ranking Stasi and party officials. But it was much more pervasive in West Germany, where - in whatever part of society, whether in the The economy, the judiciary, medicine, science or the media – there was no denazification.” This historical continuity among the elites of the new Federal Republic has now been proven in countless books. From the beginning, the CDU was riddled with former NSDAP members. It only recently became known that the BND, on the instructions of the Adenauer administration, infiltrated an undercover agent into the Eichmann defense office in order to prevent information about the Nazi past of the head of the Chancellery, Dr. Hans Globke became known.The fairy tale about the purified Federal Republic of Germany and the two evil extremes against which it defends itself lasts just as long until you open a history book. Former Nazi justice officials were also involved in the renewed persecution of communists in the Federal Republic of Germany, which led to the ban on the KPD in 1956.

Anti-Semitism and the Global Right

But the winners write history. “The thoughts of the ruling class are the ruling thoughts in every epoch, i.e. the class which is the ruling material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual power.” (Marx) Therefore, anti-Semitism in the Federal Republic of Germany is now seen as a danger that threatens the free society from both ends of the political spectrum. This statement is not based on an analysis, but has simply been repeated by the mass media and politicians for so long that it is now believed by a large part of the population. The AfD continues with this tactic and now begins to constantly repeat that Hitler was actually a left-wing radical. If this stupidity is not stopped, we in this country will soon be ready to understand anti-Semitism as a purely left-wing phenomenon. This would fit very well into the agenda of the global right, which is working – with considerable success – to redefine anti-Semitism as criticism of the Israeli government. The German political establishment, the Antilopen Gang and the Amadeu Antonio Foundation can therefore rely on allies such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei and Viktor Orbán who are deeply committed to humanism in their fight against anti-Semitism.

What unites anti-Semites and “authoritarian anti-anti-Semitism” (Peter Ulrich) is the inability to distinguish between Jewish people and the State of Israel. Just as the anti-Semite blames all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government, the German press unanimously declares the rapper Dahabflex's line "Death to the IDF" - the army that, according to all human rights organizations, is committing genocide and has killed over 1,300 people in Gaza since the ceasefire - a call for the extermination of Jewish life. One may find this demand right or wrong; Whether it is anti-Semitic is another matter. In his book “Anti-Semite! – An Accusation as an Instrument of Power,” Moshe Zuckermann describes the mixing of debates about anti-Semitism, the Middle East conflict and German history. He highlights “the political damage that is being done to the emancipatory fight against injustice, domineering violence and repression through the ideologically distorted appropriation of the categories “anti-Semitism”, “Shoah”, “Zionism” and “Israel”. Last but not least, this damages the memory of the victims of Auschwitz and the fight against anti-Semitism itself, as they are misused through instrumentalization for other interests.

That doesn't mean that criticism of Israel per se cannot be anti-Semitic in motivation; in the circles surrounding the former NPD, which, in addition to their contempt for Israel, also like to proclaim their love for Adolf Hitler, this is actually quite obvious. However, this case cannot simply be applied like a template to any situation according to the laws of formal logic. True knowledge requires dialectics, i.e. “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” (Lenin). Only those who understand the IDF as a synonym for Jews and simply ignore all of the rapper's other statements can come to the conclusion that Dahabflex is an anti-Semite. But that wouldn't be a statement about reality, but rather a subjective thought game on the part of the observer, an abstract analysis of an abstract situation: If Dahabflex meant it like the NPD, it would be anti-Semitic. If I interpret a statement however I want, I end up with the result that I wanted from the start. That just has nothing to do with social reality. It's about opinion, not truth. Nevertheless, that is enough for the position of “editor-in-chief” at Welt, as Nicholas Potter has shown. Whoever has the material power in a society is also its spiritual power.

The authoritarian character as an eternal anti-Semite?

In certain circles of “authoritarian anti-anti-Semitism” (Ulrich), these very obvious contradictions, which emerge quite quickly upon closer analysis, are papered over with the help of half-knowledge of psychoanalysis. Anti-Semitism is so deeply rooted in the left's thought structure that they actually mean Jews when they think they are talking about Israel. The term “authoritarian character” is often used as evidence for this, but this is then understood to mean something completely different than what Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno understood by it when they coined and developed the term. The authoritarian character is the eternal anti-Semite, which survives time as a metaphysical character structure and has now quite accidentally found its home in the Palestinian population after the German national soul. Solidarity with the Palestinians on the left is therefore a found opportunity to live out deep-seated anti-Semitism under a pretext. This is just another hypothetical thought game that needs to be tested against reality.

There is nothing wrong with the trial and error method. According to this principle, the comparison of hypotheses with empirical reality and the psychoanalytic interpretation of the context, the psychology of the “potentially fascist individual” was examined in a five-year project in the Studies on Authoritarian Character with over 2000 participants under the direction of Theodor W. Adorno, Elke Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford. The authors of the studies didn't just start thinking and then look for a few empirical examples and Freud quotes that serve as evidence for what they thought. The studies on the authoritarian character were carried out systematically by examining the material reality of their time. The questionnaires were modified several times, the scales for measuring authoritarian attitudes were further developed, the statistical relationships were evaluated by academic psychologists, and interviews were conducted and interpreted by psychoanalytically trained people. Based on the empirical investigations in the five years of the studies, it was checked whether the empirical evidence really stands up to the own hypotheses or whether they need to be changed accordingly. The results of the studies arise from this systematic investigation of the historically specific situation in the USA in the post-war period. Therefore, you cannot simply pick out individual passages from the work at will and integrate them into your own opinion on today's political issues.

In order to substantiate the suspicion of anti-Semitism, which is particularly widespread among today's left, there would have to be empirical surveys that could at least provide evidence of such a tendency. In 2025, “The Berlin Monitor” was most recently carried out by the Senate Department for Labor, Social Affairs, Equality, Integration, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination in cooperation with the University of Leipzig and the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences with a particular focus on investigating antigypsy and anti-Semitic attitudes. The result: "Berliners who position themselves on the far left or center left are generally less likely to express anti-Semitic resentment. Nevertheless, one in twelve have a closed anti-Semitic world view that is based on Israel-related or post-colonial anti-Semitism. On the far left, the often mentioned turn to Israel-related and post-colonial anti-Semitism can be seen. However, this is only a small increase and is even among them Resentment far below the approval of the center-right and far-right sides of the political-ideological spectrum.” This coincides with one of the key findings of Adorno's studies, namely that the object of the hostile attitude of the authoritarian character is relatively variable. People whose political goal is the large-scale remigration of non-Germans also don't think too well of the Jews when in doubt. The suspicion is that the CDU, Springer and the global right are not the right alliance partner for the fight against anti-Semitism or for any other progress in human history.

The racist establishment as a moral arbiter

The accusation that anti-Semitic attitudes are particularly widespread on the left is without any empirical evidence. Not because it's true, but because those in power constantly repeat it. This does not mean that the left is completely free of anti-Semitism. There are also homosexual priests in the Catholic Church. According to the Monitor report in Berlin, i.e., according to Springer, in the new headquarters of Hamas in Germany, anti-Semitism on the left is clearly the lowest in comparison to all other political camps. The accusation of anti-Semitism against the left is not about reality, but about the enforcement of dominant interests. It serves as an instrument of power to combat resistance to German support for the genocide in Gaza and now to prevent a left-wing mayor in Berlin. In a moral wickedness that is unparalleled, under the guise of the fight against anti-Semitism, sentiment is being created against Muslims and leftists, which is helping the AfD achieve its election victories. As a movement, the left would do well to finally stop gasping for breath at every buffoon in the bourgeois press and start distancing itself from everyone so as not to end up in the firing line of “authoritarian anti-anti-Semitism” (Ulrich). Finally, we do not ask any supporter of the market economy to distance themselves from malnutrition in the Third World or from any party sitting in the EU Parliament to distance themselves from tens of thousands of deaths at Europe's external borders before we exchange three sentences with them.

The “permissible” spectrum of public opinion is not a metaphysical court of morality, but is defined by the ruling class. In response to the elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the government is now trying to speed up laws against expropriation, not against the AfD's remigration plans, which, on the contrary, are being adopted into its own programs. Ultimately it willshitstormagainst the left is constantly fueled by the racist establishment of Ulf Poschardt, Julian Reichelt, Friedrich Merz & Co., i.e. those bootlickers of capital who give about as much attention to questions of morality as Netanyahu does to international law. Instead of trying to obey such people in advance so as not to disqualify themselves in civil discourse, the left should reflect on the tradition in which it stands. Realizing the Buchenwald survivors' vow to “shatter Nazism” and “build a new world of peace and freedom” remains the historic task of the global socialist left. The ruling class will further promote climate collapse, militarization and fascisation. The ongoing crisis will once again be the breeding ground for the spread of racist and anti-Semitic ideologies. Socialism or barbarism. The left has to justify itself before this task, not before the bourgeois public of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is being driven ahead by the right-wing establishment. Like the party's district associationsThe leftfrom Neukölln and Wedding have shown, you can even win elections with it.

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