From David Mueller in Berlin AUGUST 25 was a truly historic day in Germany; two to four hundred fascists, cheered on by a mob of several thousand, burned down a hostel for asylum-seekers in Rostock.
And on the same day, the leaders of the opposition SPD let it be known they would support changes in article 16 of the German constitution, which stipulates that the politically persecuted enjoy the right of asylum.
It is just a year since Nazis in the town of Hoyerswerda were able to violently shut down a home for immigrants.
The CDU/CSU government had already made asylum an election issue, successfully using it to deflect attention from their lack of answers. But that time they weren't able to exploit the question to build their own support. Militant neo-fascists, however, exploited the racist atmosphere to carry out violent actions.
This was even more the case in Rostock. The Nazis have now succeeded - through blatant terror - in influencing national politics for the first time since the Hitler regime.
The Nazis no longer 'only confine themselves to breaking up left demos and intimidating immigrants, refugees and other 'un-Germans'. They now play a clear political role.
Bourgeois politicians and the CDU Mecklenburg-Vorpommern regional government, directly responsible for Rostock and its police, initially approved the terror.
This is demonstrated by the fact that atonestage on the 25th, only six Rostock police opposed over 200 armed Nazis, while hundreds of border guards stood inactively by, with no orders to intervene. It is little known that 60 per cent of those arrested were anti-fascists who tried to help the asylumFascists flying the flag seekers.
The press and the bourgeois politicians talk of 'the helplessness or me ponce • In plall speaking, his means thei simply don't want to act. The self-same police chiefs and politicians readily mobilised over 3,000 policemen against the anti-fascist demonstration on August 29, and arrested over 90 people even before the march. The racist basic attitudes of the bourgeois politicians and the police leaders are well-known. They are out to enforce one concrete political aim; changing the constitutional right of asylum. Additionally, the racist wave is important to the government, because it deflects attention from its lack of perspectives for dealing with the crisis bought on by reunification. It's also no surprise that the bourgeois media and politicians on the one hand set themselves 'the violence of the right and the violence of the left!).
They mean they don't want an independent, active fascist movement at this point, and want a hard hitting anti-fascist movement still less. But at the same time display surges of understanding for the Nazis.
The whole spectrum of bourgeois politicians speak only of 'a solution to the problem through stopping the influx of asylumseekers'. Atthe same time, CDU and SPD security experts use the situation in an almost macabre fashion to demand the creation of a 2,000-strong special police force.
It's easy to guess who it would actually be deployed against; Nazi terror leads directly to the strong state- against the left.
All measures bourgeois politicians seek to paint as directed against the Nazis actually play into their hands. Thus the asylum-seekers in Rostock are evacuated, the right of asylum is altered and the state re-armed.
Nazi success
The Nazis can count the whole affair a major success; even as the terrors of Rostock fadeaway, there are still five-ten attacks daily on Germany's refugee hostels.
It is disastrous that the SPD leadership has flipped its position, not only over asylum but on deployment of German troops in United Nations forces.
In a nutshell: the SPD leadership will participate in the production of refugees and then inder their entry into Germany. One section of the SPD topsare flirting with thoughts of a Grand Coalition. The real background to the capitulation is the integration of the SPD bureaucracy into the apparatus of the bourgeois state and their cluelessness in the current situation.
The SPD has no more of an alternative to the conservatives than it did at the start of the Brandt era. The breakdown of stalinism did not hit the party as evidently as it did the stalinistreformist left, but it gives way step by step to attacks from the right and, given the shift in the balance of forces to the right, does not even consider a counterattack.
The only opposition comes from the SPD's youth wing, but even they cannot muster the necessary district aggregate to force a special party conference.
The opposition is so dis'East and West, down with the Nazi pest' persed that now SPD leader Engholm is even considering convening such a conference to put his politics over.
If the party continues to retreat, many young socialists will probably resign or go over to the Greens. Nevertheless, it remains the task of socialists to discuss with these comrades and build common activity against racism and militarism.
Broad support
The Rostock counter-demonstration was notably broad, ranging from district union federations to anarchists. There was considerable support among the 20,000 people for embracing action with the far left.
The left is still able to mobilise far larger numbers than the radical right. But the demo also revealed crucial splits on the left. One part of the reformist spectrum' - above all people from the lower middle class but also increasingly the lumpen proletariat (for example, in Hoyerswerda) and apprentices - gives ground to the ideology behind the racist measures, f example calling for restrictions on immigration.
The opposite mistake is made by some 'radicals' that fiercely polemicise against racist ideology and organise militant resistance, but are unwilling to put forward social demands at the cametime They don't believe that it is possible to win over a convinced racist through social questions. This is a big mistake when the source of much of the racism in the ex-GDR stems precisely from the unemployment and social devaststaion that has come with re-unification.
In order to build a leftopposition, the anti-racist struggle for complete legal and social equality for everyone must be combined with a movement of immigrants and refugees putting forward social demands for all workers.
Only in this way can a left pole be created, constituting an alternative to racism. If wedon't create it, for more and more people in Germany, 'foreigners out!' will become a political programme. No. 27 12 Sept, 1992
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İNOSTUND • WESINIEDER MiT a NAZIPEST