It is legitimate to point out the danger of an uncontrolled escalation of the Ukraine war. But Habermas and his left-wing adepts fall into Putin’s anti-fascist propaganda trap when they spread moral defeatism out of fear of the nuclear threat.
Since the Maidan revolution in 2014, Ukrainians have been fighting for their nation’s right to self-determination, the continuation of their westward journey, for freedom and democracy. Putin’s response to this was the annexation of Crimea, his “green men” who “liberated” the supposedly pro-Russian areas in the east of the country.
The Putin understanders and Putin servants in the West by no means just want cheap gas for Europe. They still think in imperial spheres of influence and repeat the fairy tale of Putin’s humiliation and insult because NATO has expanded eastward. After the annexation of Crimea, Helmut Schmidt expressed understanding for Putin’s actions and denied the Ukrainians the right to be a nation.
Not really a mental reversal
This benevolent view of Moscow has a long tradition, especially in Germany. Immediately before martial law was imposed in Poland and the Solidarnosc movement was crushed in 1981, Schmidt said in a conversation that he could understand if the Soviet Union got involved, because “as a leading power it had to keep its shop clean”. In June 2015, Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the agreement on Nord Stream 2 as a “bridge between Russia and Europe” that serves peace, despite protests from the United States, Central and Eastern European countries, the Baltic States and Ukraine.
Peace was always more important to the left than freedom, even in the days of détente.
In the meantime, apologies have been given for the obvious failure of the bridging policy, and in his speech on the anniversary of May 8, 1945, Olaf Scholz put support for the Ukraine, including with heavy weapons, under the new motto “freedom and security”. Under public pressure, SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil announces a new Ostpolitik.
But the long hesitation raises doubts about a fundamental mental reversal – not only in the SPD, but also among intellectuals, who are now only slightly concealing the demand for the surrender of Ukraine in favor of world peace. Social Democracy in particular has never come to terms with its ties to the communists in Moscow and later to Putin. Even in the days of detente, peace was always more important to her than freedom. The status quo of the post-war order should not be shaken: change through rapprochement and liberalization through stabilization.
Ultimately, however, it was less Michael Gorbachev than the NATO double-track decision and the resolute policy of deterrence of the West and Ronald Reagan as well as the peaceful revolutions of the civil rights movements in 1989 that caused history to take a different course. For a long time, social democrats and many intellectuals viewed the East Central European dissidents as dangerous disruptors of world peace and the politics of detente. In 1990, Günter Grass was still justifying the Wall and the division of Europe as a punishment for Auschwitz. And Jürgen Habermas mocked the “DM nationalism” of the East Germans in the face of reunification.
1989 – does that have to be?
In 1993, when the Polish historian and dissident Adam Michnik reproached him as to why his work contained no fundamental discussion of Stalinism, Habermas replied that fear of applause from the wrong side had kept him silent, saying that he had not entered “anti-communist waters advised» want. Anyone who supported the anti-communist protests of dissidents against the communist dictatorship in the Federal Republic before 1989 was considered a cold warrior, reactionary and right-wing by left-liberal intellectuals and many social democrats.
Only a minority on the left saw things differently. The end of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the “anti-fascist protective wall” did not arouse much enthusiasm among many intellectuals. They quarreled with the united nation and saw the rise of a new nationalism. On the other hand, those who regarded nation states as obsolete and praised post-nationalism and the European federal state were considered progressive.
Many did not like the fact that during the peaceful revolutions of 1989, “civil” liberties, one’s own nation and a return to the Western community of values were expressly on the agenda. It was also uncomfortable that with the end of Soviet rule, the abysses of communist crimes were once again a topic of public debate, at least for a short time. A drastic paradigm shift had taken place in the course of the student movement in 1968, which dissolved the anti-totalitarian consensus of the post-war period.
The renaissance of Marxism at universities and in social debates put an end to the Western liberal theories of totalitarianism, which compared National Socialism, Fascism, Communism and Stalinism. Various theories of fascism now dominated the discourse, Stalin’s crimes were left out.
A mixture of anti-fascism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism – as a result of the Vietnam War – condensed into a pronounced anti-Western resentment that was to be found in social democratic circles as well as in intellectual circles. At the same time, it was considered chic to propagate a generalized suspicion of fascism against the Federal Republic. A purifying intellectual self-reflection is still missing today.
Putin plays on the keyboard of complexes
Obviously, with his anti-fascism rhetoric, Putin still touches this blind spot among leftists, social democrats, intellectuals and cultural workers and gets caught up in it. Historical perceptions focus less on the Western Allies fighting Hitler than on the glorious Soviet Union with its Red Army. The myth of the victorious defeat of fascism ennobled the Soviet Union as the great anti-fascist liberator.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 remained underexposed, as did the successful practice of the Soviet Communist Party of exploiting Western intellectuals and artists (Pablo Picasso, Leon Feuchtwanger, André Gide) as Fellow Travelers at their anti-fascist writers’ congresses. Under the force of the magnificent parades in Moscow on May 9, 1945 to celebrate the victory over fascism, the millions of victims of communist crimes have been forgotten over the many decades, and the atrocities played down or denied. The myth of the anti-fascist liberator and founder of world peace is still latently effective and obscures the view of Russia.
With his historical lies and reversal of the perpetrator-victim relationship, Vladimir Putin still conjures up the image of the Russians as the main victims of the Nazis. Although Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine were particularly affected by the German war of annihilation and the atrocities, four million Ukrainians died in the famine initiated by Stalin. Today, Putin calls Ukrainians fascists and Nazis who plotted genocide against Russians and wants to wipe out their state and culture.
It is legitimate and necessary to point out the dangers of an unpredictable escalation and expansion of the war. But Jürgen Habermas and the intellectuals calling for Ukraine’s capitulation fall into Putin’s anti-fascist propaganda trap when they accept his threat of nuclear war out of fear.
Fearful retreat will not quench the Emperor’s hunger, but increase it. If we don’t stop Putin now, not only will Ukraine be destroyed. Then the “Jihad against Western liberalism” proclaimed by Putin’s chief ideologue Alexander Dugin in 2015 will also have been successful. The war and the crisis in Ukraine have only just begun. A new, anti-totalitarian consensus is now urgently needed throughout the West in order to be able to robustly defend freedoms and meet the enormous challenges.
The political scientist Ulrike Ackerman is Director of the John Stuart Mill Institute for the Study of Freedom. Her new book «Die Neue Schweigespirale. How the politicization of science restricts our freedoms» (WBG, Darmstadt).