Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 10

1 Me, my time and the beast of nationalism
1 Me, my time and the beast of nationalism
In 1967, experiencing a neofascist Greek junta the six year old Yanis
had to hide under a red blanket just to listen to Deutsche Welle
broadcasts (you talk about it in the preface of your latest book). I al-
ready gained experience about the world as an activist in the 68 stu-
dents’ movement. While you grew up as an admirer of Willy Brandt
and German social democracy I tried to unveil old Nazi networks and
cliques of former NS party members still backing each other. Even
today, you deem the Bretton Woods gold and dollar standard post
war period “capitalism’s golden age” and “a unique moment in hu-
man history”. 1
1.1 “A unique moment in human history?”
For us, the post war period was shaped by the dominant regime of
US American worldwide Coca-Cola imperialism with Western Germa-
ny being pepped up in the wake of the new and only Western super-
power as its future grateful and obedient transatlantic junior partner.
The second great clash between the imperialist powers, World War II,
reshuffled the cards of global bloc formation and economic hegemo-
ny. It had reduced or destroyed everything - the means of produc-
tion, the industrial sites and the infrastructures - and killed millions of
workforce. In terms of economy the war was a huge clean sweep of
the capitalist system. In most countries life and economy had been
switched to zero, in Germany even to minus. So necessarily the post
war period in the damaged Europe had to become a period of recon-
struction, growth, and prosperity. Being reset after the World War
capitalism could not but flourish. “A unique moment in human histo-
ry”? Dear Yanis, no! Quite the contrary: A very sad, humiliating time
in history, the peoples struggling out of the horrors and sequelae of
war trauma, famine-stricken, the men dead or in war imprisonment.
The women everywhere, the German rubble women too, displayed
enormous stamina to survive with their families. My own father died
of serious war wounds, my mother bereaved with a little son, - me.
The same all over Europe or Japan. Irrespective of national war-guilt
questions, the post war period was grounded in the military cemeter-
ies of World War II, the holocaust, in “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”,
1
Yanis Varoufakis: On Ancient Greece And the Nature of Money (youtube, 04.04.2016, 14:30-14:46).
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