The "hot autumn"
In this campaign, they stop at nothing if it serves the end of stepping up arma-
Reagan offers "disarmament proof the missiles in West Germany dozen to cover up the
U.S.'s increasing
German government is carrying out "edcampaigns that cost millions of the taxpayers' Marks.
The bourgeois prestige papers are pushing the arms race like the right-wing gutter press.
ample, the main headline in the Septem-
From the October 10 issue of Was Tun paper of the West German section of the
The "Hot Autumn" got underway a good while ago. The offensive is already in high gear and has scored its first victories. On a world scale, billions are be-.. ing spent on these actions. goes by without some action or campaign being launched to capture public opinion for the goals of this movement.
What I am talking about is the hot autumn of the cold warriors, the offensive of those who are pushing the arms race, the billions of dollars and Deutschmarks that this costs, and the daily provocations and black propaganda campaigns cooked up by today's and yesterday's "crusaders against the East" (1) to conceal their preparations for war.
To cite just a few examples from the
In the framework of their fall "Confident Enterprise," the U.S. forces in West Germany for the first time practiced digging mass graves in a section of forest near Hanau. U.S. army spokesman Walter Negen ex-
"It was an exercise for dealing with human losses in the event of a war. The entire operation was carried out reverently, as it would be in real life." (From the U.S. Army paper Stars and Stripes, cited in Der Speigel, No 40.)
- At the beginning of October, West German soliders in Wetzlar held an exercise allegedly designed to train troops how to deal with peace demonstrators getting into the base.
"Our defense measures go as far as using fire arms. But that is of course the final resort." (Frankfurter Rundschau, October 11.)
- The Christian Democrat minister of war, Woerner, ordered the drawing up of new guidelines for the West German army with regard to the fostering of German military traditions. And he asked for the opinion of the Verband deutscher Soldaten (VdS - German Soliders Association, an archreactionary veterans group with a good leaven of former Waffen-SS
Among other things, the VdS called for "a more understanding attitude to the carrying of the banners and standards of old German units [that is, of Hitler army units] and a stop to the condemning and of the former Waffen-SS." Woerner promised to consider the VdS recommendations favorably. (Der Spiegel, No 41.)
In early October, Franz Alt, a member of the Christian Democratic Party and a practicing Catholic, was removed from his position as TV news moderator. The reason for this was obviously his firm (moderate but firm) opposition to stepping up the arms race. The only TV news program where opponents of the arms race could be heard had to be "normalized" for this autumn of re-
- In the middle of September a story appeared in Der Spiegel about the "autonomi" - the "militant wing of the peace movement." thing bought and paid for by Zimmerman [the notoriously reactionary minister of the interior and the Constitution Defense Service [political police].
The story included a long string of quotations of ultraleftist and terrorist
Secret service officials were called upon to wax eloquent about all the terrorist attacks these groups threatened to carry out this fall.
But there was not a word about the fact that people who can be shown to be secret service infiltrators have played the actions attributed groups have proved to be carried out by Neo-Nazi groups, which themselves have been infiltrated for many years by secret service agents. (See Konkret, September
It would be quite wrong to try to minimize these symptoms. They are not iso-
They are part of a campaign psychologically for war and, in this context, to reduce democratic rights and step up the attack on the working class.
For some time, members of the U.S. government have been saying that we are not in a postwar period but in a prewar one. In its October 10 issue, the most influential publication of international big capital, The Financial Times, describber 15 issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was *700 SS-20s deployed, four new SS-20s every month."
We have only to keep two facts in
First, every serious bourgeois publication stresses that NATO and the U.S. are far superior militarily to the Warsaw Pact, and in particular as regards nuc lear weapons, and there is no way that the USSR can keep pace with the Western armament. On October 10, The Finanical Times wrote: "In the last five years, in real terms NATO arms spending, led by the U.S., has increased by 11 to 12 percent, while Warsaw Pact spending has increased by 4 to 6 percent, that is by about half as much."
The disarmament proposal made by the Soviet government is that if no additional NATO missiles are deployed, the number of SS-20s could be reduced to the number of missiles already stationed in France and Britain. All the SS-20s over that could be dismantled and scrapped. This would take us back to the situation that existed for a long time before the NATO Double-Track Decision, when no representative Western political figure talked about a Soviet nuclear missile threat. The U.S., French, British, and West German governments totally re-
But these people are scarcely ested in facts. What they are interested in is war, to be more exact, two kinds of
For the arms lovers and warmong ers, victory in the war against the peace movement is the precondition for being able to wage "serious" war.
We cannot defend ourselves against this offensive just with facts. The enemy controls 98 percent of the media and is using 100 percent of the tax money against the masses of taxpayers. We have only one means, but it is a powerful one.
In these days and weeks, we have to take our arguments massively onto the streets, to the military bases, and to the
Every friend of peace, •every enemy of war is another argument. And there will be millions of such conthis refers to the worst traditions of German expansionism toward the East. - IV.
All the quotations from English-language publications this article are retranslated from the German. - IV.