BERLIN HONORS THOSE WHO FOUGHT FASCISM. WE SHOULD HONOR THOSE WHO FOUGHT WHITE SUPREMACY.
By David Bacon
Truthout Photoessay, 1/28/18
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2018/01/berlin-honors-those-who-fought-fascism.html
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43365-as-germany-honors-those-who-fought-fascism-we-must-honor-those-who-fought-white-supremacy
In Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, a room holds plaques with the names of deputies murdered by the Nazis, marked by a black band under their name.
Hans and Traudel Horn promised it would be a tour of Berlin's socialist history, and so it was. Twice I spent a long day with them on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, trying to hear what they explained over the roar of the subway as we hurtled from monument to monument, cemetery to cemetery.
Berlin is a city of revolution and anti-fascist struggle. It is also a city of graves. Trees on one beautiful leafy hill cover the remains of 183 Berliners who fought and died on the street barricades in 1848. When they were interred in the Cemetery for the Fallen of the March Revolution, 80,000 Berliners looked on. Thirty-three others are also buried there, who died in the streets during the Revolution of 1918-19. Treptower Park's giant cold spaces cover even more bodies - seven thousand of the eighty thousand soldiers who died in the final battle to wrest Berlin from the Nazis.
Hans and Traudel are certainly not worshippers of the dead. For these two leftwing Berliners, the graves form part of a collective memory of socialism. They force an acknowledgement of the ideas those revolutionaries died to defend. Fascism's armies sought to bury those ideas forever, along with the people who held them, in the Nazis' "thousand-year reich." Treptow's buried soldiers were among the fifty million people who died stopping them.
The city's monuments, the Horns argue, keep people from forgetting whose ideas fueled that revolutionary fire: Berliners Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Other Germans - Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Ernst Thalmann, Kathe Kollwitz.
As we visited these sites I kept thinking of the intense fights we've had recently in the U.S. over our own monuments. For the last two years especially, people have fought, not to preserve monuments to a progressive past, but to get rid of those that raise up slavery and oppression.
The very fact we've had these struggles is evidence of a change in power. Monuments are a lesson in power. When anti-fascists had it in Berlin, they built the monuments to those who fought Nazism. But even when power shifted after reunification, and anti-fascist monuments were endangered, they could still be preserved by popular struggle, as they were in Berlin.
Those monuments erected to memorialize the defenders of slavery and genocide in our country also tell us about power, especially who held it during the Jim Crow and Cold War years. But now our communities are showing that there are new limits, forcing the removal of statues and flags honoring the Confederacy. The monuments to those who waged the war to make the Philippines a colony, and those who inflicted genocide on the indigenous people of California, are still standing in San Francisco. John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles still honors the man who murdered Klamath Indians and helped take California from Mexico. But perhaps we can see a day now when these men won't be so honored.
