AMY GOODMAN: Well, right now we’re going to move to an issue in the news this week. Germany’s newly elected Social Democrats moved swiftly to put their stamp on power, as plans emerged to reduce taxes in 1999 and bring forward the government’s move from Bonn to Berlin. Less than two days after Gerhard Schröder’s SPD dealt outgoing Chancellor Helmut Kohl a crushing defeat in a federal election on Sunday, the SPD’s designated finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, said in a newspaper interview the new government would cut taxes in January. Schröder said last night he expected to have a new government in place by October.

Joining us right now to talk about these significant developments in Germany and in Europe, and we’re also going to be looking at Russia, as well, is Martin Lee. His latest book is The Beast Reawakens: Millions Died to End Fascism. It Survived to Mount a Comeback. This Is the Story of How and Why. He’s also co-founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARTIN LEE: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin by talking about these elections in Germany and the significance of the victory of Gerhard Schröder.

MARTIN LEE: Well, it is quite significant, although it’s hard to understand what will happen in the future or to predict with accuracy. But the fact that a conservative coalition led by the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, which had been — had ruled since the early '80s, is now out of power is quite significant in and of itself. The fact that Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats are speaking seriously with the Greens to form a governing coalition on a national level would be unprecedented in Europe. On various — in various states in Germany, the Greens and the Social Democrats have governed together, but never on a national level. And this is the first time this would happen in any country in Europe.

I think in terms of policies, we may see significant changes in Germany in several areas. One is in the area of what qualifies German citizenship. There has been a great deal of neo-Nazi activity and a great deal of public sentiment against foreigners, partly stirred up through xenophobic election campaigns, as we’ve just seen happen in Germany. And I think one positive result of this election may be that the citizenship law will be changed in Germany to make it easier for non-ethnic Germans and who are living in Germany, who have lived in Germany, for some cases several generations — I’m speaking specifically of Turkish immigrants, Turkish guest workers — will be able to become citizens of Germany for the first time — possibly 3 million in Germany will become citizens — or may be able to obtain a dual citizenship. And this would certainly be a positive result of the elections, if this were to come to pass.

AMY GOODMAN: I was just looking at today’s Wall Street Journal and their description of what’s happening in Germany today. I’m beginning to see The Wall Street Journal, or I guess it’s been like this all the time, but it’s sort of putting up a red flag for business, what to watch out for. There’s a front-page piece actually on campus boycott efforts around the United States and how students are organizing around sweatshops. And there’s also a piece on the inner pages of The Wall Street Journal about how this new green-red coalition, as they’re calling it, will mean higher taxes, will mean higher labor costs, will mean — well, the Greens being anti-nuclear will mean certainly affecting energy policy in Germany.

MARTIN LEE: Well, it may, but it’s difficult to say, because the dominant party will be the Social Democrats, and the Social Democrats in Germany are themselves, one might say, going through an identity crisis. The party is split. Gerhard Schröder, the elected leader of the party, is very much in sync with Tony Blair in Britain, the prime minister of Britain. And as part of this, what they call the third way, that, in some sense, President Clinton in the United States is associated with, a much more moderate, business-friendly Social Democratic Party. That’s the image at least that Schröder projects. That’s what he campaigned on. That’s what helped him get elected.

But the crucial difference between the Social Democratic Party in Germany and its counterpart, the Labour Party, in Britain is that Tony Blair, in Britain, he is the leader of the party, and he really controls the party. It’s not yet clear that Schröder really totally controls his party in the way Blair does. There are other very powerful figures in the Social Democratic Party, including Oskar Lafontaine, who’s the chairman of the party, who is more associated with the traditional perspectives on the left and would not necessarily go for this idea of the moderate third way. So, Schröder has been really playing a balancing act, trying not to scare off big business in Germany, but trying not to also alienate the traditional base of the Social Democrats. How that will play out is unclear.

The problem for any elected leader in Europe today is that they have to deal with the difficulties of the global economic picture, the economic globalization, which in Europe, in some ways, constrains the political leaders. It’s one of the reasons why the — one of the striking aspects of the recent campaign in Germany has been the fact that the Christian Democratic Party, the leading conservative party, and the Social Democratic Party, ostensibly left of center, that their campaigns were very, very similar, that on programmatic aspects it was very difficult to tell the difference between them. And in that sense, it may not represent — the victory for Schröder — such a striking triumph of the left, but more of just simply rejection of the status quo in Germany, where the unemployment is very high, more than 4 million, representing, at least officially, 11% of the country, very severe in the eastern part of the country, the former communist part.

So, whether the policies of the Social Democratic Party will in fact be a red flag for big business, it’s just too soon to tell. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because the situation in Germany is somewhat different in terms of the left-of-center parties than the other countries in Europe.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the division within the Green Party and the forces within the Green Party that are trying to shape it?

MARTIN LEE: Well, the challenge for the Social Democrats in trying to make a coalition with the Greens is to get their programs to harmonize, at least on crucial issues, so that they can forge a four-year program to stay in office until the next elections in 2002. The Greens themselves, as you pointed out, have been split for a long time between what they call the realists, on the one hand, who want to participate in coalition governments with other parties, and the fundamentalists, or the fundies, in the Greens. This is not like Christian fundamentalism, but those who want to stick to the basic precepts of the party since its roots, and the Greens grew out of the countercultural and New Left movements in Germany from the late ’60s and early ’70s. So, you will have tension within the Greens, as the leaders of the Greens Party, such as Joschka Fischer, engage in negotiations with the Social Democrats.

One point of conflict will be around the question of nuclear power and nuclear energy. The Greens want to close all nuclear power plants immediately. There’s about 20 nuclear power plants in Germany. The Social Democrats want to phase it out over time, over a 10-year period. There are other issues, as well, that could be problematic, but —

AMY GOODMAN: Martin Lee, we’re going to get to those other issues in a minute, but we do have to break for stations to identify themselves. We’re talking about what’s happening in Germany. We’ll also talk about right politics in Germany and Russia when we come back. Our guest is Martin Lee. His book is called The Beast Reawakens, and it looks at fascism in Europe. You are listening to Pacific Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Welcome you are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we look at the developments in Germany with Sunday’s election leading to the victory of Gerhard Schröder, who is a Social Democrat who toppled Helmut Kohl, the leader who had been there for 16 years. Our guest in this segment is Martin Lee. He is the author of The Beast Reawakens, has done an extensive look at the rise of fascism in Europe. And it’s great to have you with us, Martin.

MARTIN LEE: We were just talking, Amy, about the Greens, and I think one feature of the Greens in the last few years is that the Greens themselves have been changing their policies and moving to the right, if you will, or adopting positions that would have been unthinkable to its originators back in the 1970s. The question about NATO, for example, the Greens for a long time opposed membership for Germany in NATO, and now the signs are that they won’t press that position. In terms of the — in the context of trying to forge a government with the Social Democrats, they’ll drop that. For a long time, the Greens were ardent pacifists in principle, but a few years ago the Greens signed on and supported the German government’s efforts to have German military troops be sent to areas outside of NATO’s purview to engage in peacekeeping activities, or so-called peacekeeping activities, particularly in the Balkans, in Croatia and Yugoslavia, in the war there. The Greens supported this, and yet, in 1997, it was reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, had infiltrated the European Union’s monitoring mission in former Yugoslavia and used it as a cover to illegally run arms and send money to Croatian and Bosnian Muslim forces. This is Germany’s allies in the region. And while the Greens may have not wanted that to happen, by supporting that policy, they allowed it. You know, they helped set the stage for that. So, the evolution of the Greens in this circumstance will be very interesting.

But again, there’s a lot of hope in this situation, as well. I would think a Social Democratic-Green coalition would be much more sensitive to the concerns of Third World countries and the needs of so-called developing countries. I think that they will try to forge coordinated economic policies with other Social Democratic-type leaders in Europe, particularly the leaders of Italy, France and the United Kingdom, to take a — to basically develop a different response to the global economic situation than the freewheeling free market American prescriptions, which I think would be a good development to the extent that that could happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Gerhard Schröder talked about the Berlin Republic. Explain the significance of shifting the capital.

MARTIN LEE: Well, the capital has been in — of German has been in Bonn, because that was the capital of West Germany during the Cold War. By the year 2000, the capital will move in total to Berlin. The significance of this is that it suggests a new beginning for Germany. That’s the way Schröder depicts it.

And yet, there’s sort of a creepy aspect to it, because as the German government prepares to move, with hardly any criticism whatsoever, it’s going to be moving now into buildings associated with the most gruesome machinations of the Third Reich, reunify Germany’s financial experts. The next government’s financial experts are going to be housed in Göring’s Air Ministry from Hitler’s days. The defense specialists from contemporary Germany will be devising their strategies in the same offices where Hitler’s generals plotted the invasion of the east. You have the Foreign Ministry, will be formulating its policies in the former Reichsbank. That was the Nazi central bank. So, it’s a little bit strange, and all this is happening with very little commentary or opposition in Germany, that’s sort of a kind of a sweeping away of the memory of the past a bit.

But in terms of Schröder’s policies, his foreign policies, in particular, he has tried to make the point very clearly that there will be very little shift from his predecessor’s. And that’s something that may raise some eyebrows, because there’s been kind of a resurgent nationalism in Germany leading up to this election, and that has affected the foreign policy, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about that, about that nationalism and about right-wing politics in Germany, something that you have certainly been following in your work as author of the book The Beast Reawakens and just your continued interest in that.

MARTIN LEE: One of the very striking things about this past election over the weekend was how poorly the extreme-right-wing parties or the neo-Nazi parties did. I was a bit surprised at this. On the national level, none of the neo-Nazi parties were able to score above 5%, which would have enabled them to win seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag. I should point out as an aside that the former Communist Party, or the successor to the Communist Party in East Germany, this party of Democratic Socialism, was able to break the 5% barrier, so they will be accorded full rights as a political party in Germany. That will, if anything, give more of a left accent to the government in Germany. But in terms of the extreme right, at the same time the elections were happening nationally, there were a few state elections in Germany. And I had expected that the extreme right would, if not repeat the performance of last April’s election in Saxony-Anholt, the eastern state, where very high unemployment led to really a smashing breakthrough for the Deutsche Volksunion — the DVU is one of three neo-Nazi parties that were contesting elections. They scored 13% of the vote last April in the eastern state. That was the strongest showing for any extreme-right party since Hitler’s days. And given the extremely dire economic situation, where unemployment in the eastern states, the former communist states in Germany, is very high, officially put at above 20%, unofficially usually twice that figure, and breeding on that discontent, the extreme right has been able to make gains. And yet, even in the state elections, the neo-Nazi parties didn’t do all that well.

And I think there’s several reasons for this. One is the fact that there are three parties contesting the elections, and they tend to — there are three extreme-right parties, and they tend to divide the vote between themselves. They run on almost identical platforms. These parties, incidentally, are the Deutsche Volksunion, as I mentioned, the Republikaner and also the National Democrats. They’re called the NPD. Another factor, I think, is that in terms of a protest vote, or if you want to vote against the mainstream established party, you do have an option in eastern Germany: You could vote for the successor to the Communist Party. And indeed, they scored very well in eastern Germany, nearly 23% of the vote, almost equaling the total of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. So, for — and I think another very, very key factor is that the mainstream parties, both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, appropriated many of the key themes of the extreme right. So, both campaigned on anti-immigrant platforms. In fact, it seemed all the parties except for the Greens and the Party of Democratic Socialism were falling all over themselves during the election campaign trying to be more anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner than the next. So, while the extreme right didn’t do very well in terms of the numbers in the last election, their themes were very much in evidence.

And it, I think, attests to the fact that the — unlike in other Western European countries, where when the mainstream parties have adopted and mimicked the rhetoric of the extreme right and utilized some of their own policies, that has in fact fed the rise of the extreme right in countries like Italy and France and Norway and Belgium and Austria, the very opposite seems to have happened once again in Germany, where that seemed to weaken the extreme right, at least on an electoral level.

I should point out that during an election campaign, a lot of organizing takes place. And on a grassroots level, I think it helped further to build the infrastructure of parties like the National Democratic Party, which is the neo-Nazi party in Germany, which is very much a grassroots-oriented party, which has been making gains in the east, to the point where they held a public demonstration in Leipzig, an eastern city, and I think nearly 5,000 neo-Nazis were openly demonstrating, which is something that technically is illegal in Germany, and yet it seems to go on.

AMY GOODMAN: Martin Lee, can you talk about how the right politics in Germany compare to what’s going on in Russia today?

MARTIN LEE: Well, the situation in Russia is obviously devastating and extremely serious. When I, several years ago, had been interviewing neo-Nazi leaders around the world, and I would ask them, “Where do you see fascism really coming back?” they all said Russia, that’s the best chance for it. And that was before you had the complete collapse of the Russian economy. So, the comparison, I think, is much more serious in Russia, the situation.

There are links between German neo-Nazi groups and Russian neofascist groups. There are many different sorts of links. They visit each other. They strategize together. In Russia today, you have about 70 different openly fascist groups that are operating. The most significant of these is called the Russian National Union. It’s led by a man named Alexander Barkashov. And it’s very much involved in paramilitary training. It’s been developing a grassroots infrastructure in different parts of Russia.

And I think what’s significant now, you had — in Russia’s 89 components, you have affiliates of the Russian National Union operating in 64 of them, claims to have more than 70,000 members, including many drawn from the police and the demoralized Russian army. They get together every year for weapons training classes, and so forth and so on. What’s striking is in how in some areas of Russia this overtly Nazi or neo-Nazi organization, this Russian National Union, has been able to collaborate or get into situations where the governmental forces have welcomed their collaboration. Even in Moscow, unbelievably enough, the Russian National Union members have been asked to help to provide security in local city parks and so forth. So, I mean, that’s kind of disturbing.

But the — you have also in Russia, as in Germany, a rising tide of xenophobic violence, anti-foreigner violence. Human Rights Watch has documented numerous instances of police brutality in Russia involving electroshock torture, sexual assault, beatings and murder. And most of this has been directed toward darker-skinned people, who have been systematically abused by Russian authorities. You had demonstrations this past spring, when 1,500 Azerbaijanis protested in the streets of Moscow when one of the — an Azeri trader was stabbed to death by neofascists. And so, you have many examples of this, but —

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I was just reading — it’s not exactly related, but somewhat — a report on AP that talks about the Russian news agency saying that workers at a construction company in Moscow were held in cages for poor job performance.

MARTIN LEE: I mean, it’s — the kind of things that are going on there are just unbelievable. They’re feeding dog food, literally, to the Russian army. How the country hasn’t completely exploded at this point is beyond me. And I think the worst is yet to come. And I think that it provides a very, very fertile turf for ultranationalist demagogues. And who will next lead Russia after this interim period is hard to know. People are talking about Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov as a potential leader. He himself, Luzhkov, is an outspoken nationalist whose administration has a long record of mistreating ethnic minorities. You have in Russia today people like Nikolai Kondratenko, who’s a virulent antisemite. He was elected governor of the agriculturally rich Kuban region in southern Russia. So you have a great deal going on in the provinces, in the hinterland, outside of Moscow, that’s really beyond the control of Moscow at this point. It’s almost medieval. It’s like the central authority is breaking down. It only really governs Moscow, to the extent that it governs at all. And the country is just coming undone.

AMY GOODMAN: Talking about Russian provinces, what the Soviet Union would have liked to have been a province, Afghanistan, as we take this whirlwind tour through Europe and Russia, what about what’s happening today in Afghanistan with the Taliban and how it relates to both Russian and U.S. politics, what Chris Simpson called blowback?

MARTIN LEE: It’s a very, very interesting question. It would make a long program in and of itself. But I think, in short, what you had was, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, who were supported by the United States in an effort to dislodge the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan. The problem with this is that the forces that the United States was choosing to wage its anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan were hardly loyal in the long-term or even short-term sense to the ideals of democracy, if you will, the Western ideals, or the United States, in particular.

The political views of the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, if anything, are similar to Khomeini’s in Iran, of the U.S. and the Soviet — excuse me, U.S. and Soviets as the twin Satans. I should point out that there is a different kind of Muslim tradition that dominates Iran. It’s a Shia tradition. So, that’s internal differences in the Muslim world. But I think in terms of the geopolitical orientation, it was very much what was called third position, anti-U.S., anti-Soviet. And that dovetailed very well with fascist politics in Europe and other places, also anti-U.S., anti-Soviet in its orientation, anti-U.S. culturally, anti-Soviet militarily. And that allowed for, if anything, at least a simpatico between some of the neo-Nazi groups in Europe and other forces in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Martin Lee, I want to thank you very much for spending this time with us. And it certainly is the topic of another discussion and many more, but for now we do have to wrap up the show. Martin Lee, co-founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, author, writer, activist. His latest book, The Beast Reawakens, it’s published by Little, Brown. Thanks for being with us. And again, tune in tomorrow to Democracy Now!

OGONI MAN: Who killed Abiola?

CROWD: Soldier!

OGONI MAN: For oil money?

CROWD: Soldier!

OGONI MAN: Who killed Saro-Wiwa?

CROWD: Soldier!

OGONI MAN: For oil money?

CROWD: Soldier!

OGONI MAN: Who killed my nation?

CROWD: Soldier!

OGONI MAN: For oil money?

CROWD: Soldier!

ORONTO DOUGLAS: Chevron, just like Shell, uses the military to protect its oil activities.

STEVE LAUTERBACH: The policy for all embassies overseas to support American companies and their operations abroad and to, as far as possible, promote American exports.

ORONTO DOUGLAS: Don’t pollute my water. Don’t destroy our mangrove forest. Don’t devastate our ecology.

They drill. And they kill.

AMY GOODMAN: Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship. That’s tomorrow on Democracy Now!, and we do hope you’ll tune in. Tell your friends about this special documentary that we have produced after a three-week trip and investigation in Nigeria. On Thursday, we’ll be speaking with Nigerian environmental activist Oronto Douglas.

Well, that does it for today. If you’d like a copy of today’s program, you can call the Pacifica Archives and order a cassette at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Democracy Now! is produced by Jeremy Scahill. Errol Maitland is our technical director. Special thanks to Sharan Harper and Burt Harbin. Julie Drizin is our executive producer. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to another edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!