Historical echoes indeed

So…

Ossietzy was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931.

Read the biography at the Nobel site and not just wikipedia and it transpires that his offence was committed in 1929 when Weimar was still a model democracy and the Chancellor was social democrat Hermann Muller.

And for this grievous offence he was sentenced to just 18 months in prison – which must presumably have been pretty much the minimum sentence actually possible under the law.

His real martyrdom took place after his release when he was unwise/heroic enough to stay in Germany after Hitler’s seizure of power.

So while I really can’t be bothered to read Gene’s piece I suspect he is a lot closer to grabbing the right end of the stick than you are – Ossietzky did not get the Nobel prize for publishing state secrets, he got it for being a dissident under a completely different regime than the one that jailed him briefly in 1931.

And actually the German supreme court seems to have got it pretty right in 1992.

So for there to be any real analogy with Assange at all he would have to spend a few months in jail here or in Sweden, go back to Australia and then have it almost immediately fall under a totalitarian regime which would send him to a concentration camp for being generally not the kind of person they want to have on the streets – at which point the Nobel Committee could honour him.

Game, set and match to Gene I think…

Having hit send, it occurs to me that there may conceivably be one potential analogy I missed.

Ossietzky committed his 1929 offence under a centrist government of social democrats and liberals which while a sad disappointment to all true leftists at the time appears in hindsight to be the only semi-plausible alternative to something unimaginably worse.

The effect of his publication was to further destabilise a coalition which needed all its unity to survive the great recession – and it fell within a year being replaced by increasingly authoritarian and unpopular right-wing governments (Marx, Brüning, Papen and Schleicher) who quickly prepared the way for Hitler’s rise to power.

Assange similarly seems set on destabilising Obama – and the realistic alternative to Obama is not true socialism or liberalism but a Republican party which seems hell bent on filling Brüning’s historical place.

But I doubt that is what you had in mind.

Roger,

Maybe he saw what was coming. After all the problem was rearmament- another very important factor that led to the latter events.

In the case of Obama, other grave sins, of which I´ll bring up Guantanamo.

Is it better to fight for a marginally better home governement, or for what can be a better long run?

Another neglected aspect of the post though is the inefficacy of important disclosed information to have much effect on foreign or domestic policy.

Roger: “Assange similarly seems set on destabilising Obama ”

Do you have even a shred of proof for this?

Well, you can actually read Carl von Ossietzky and his brilliant friend, Kurt Tucholsky, who collaborated with him on the Weltbuhne, on the Net. In translation, you can read Tucholsky’s summary of the case on Google books, here:
The Weimar Republic sourcebook. This will tell you all you really need to know about the trial. There is no doubt that the Decents would have been followers of Hindenberg to the last – their vocabulary and sense of the world is very much the same mixture of military fetishism and an offended sense that they world is against them and must be hurt for it. Plus, of course, the odd long distance heroism in which supporting the “soldiers” turns one into one of the soldiers.
Funny, I wondered whether Harry’s really still existed.

Barry,

Who heads the US government right now?

I wasn’t saying that he is some sort of covert Tea Party Operative – just stating the bleeding obvious that if his actions destabilise the current US govt it will be Obama and the Democrats who pay (just as it was presumably Muller and the SPD in 1929 who paid whatever the political price of Ossietzky’s article actually was).

All I am saying is that most political actions tend to have unintended consequences – and the more I think about what might follow Obama the more nervous I get.

The thing that still confuses me here is why so many people seem to be worried about Assange/Wikileaks part of this, but aren’t equally campaigning for the NYT, Guardian, and the various other newspapers involved to be closed down. It seems to me utterly uncontroversial that Wikileaks is acting as part of the press/newspaper side of the equation, so it would seem that the various government actions (whether official or backchannel) should be considered an attack on the freedom of the press.

I wonder if wikileaks could organize some sort of legal defense along the lines of giving some sort of non-controlling shares in the organisation to various newspapers they regularly deal with in order to make it completely clear their relationship, and trigger constitutional protections in the US and elsewhere (if for some bizarre reason they are being treated as a private actor just because they are a website). Or maybe conversely they could publish a monthly newspaper summary of their websites contents in dead tree format and maybe that would get them treated as what they are in the legal system.

Roger,

I know the people at Harry’s Place and while I no longer have anything to do with them either politically or personally they are mostly decent enough people with some views I now very much disagree with.

The main problem I have with them now is that like their idol Hitchens they are no longer in any meaningful sense ‘of the Left’ – and in these very dark days those of us who are no longer have the luxury of elaborately anathematising each other over what happened a long time ago in countries far, far away…

But for someone who knows any German history to compare this bunch of die-hard Blairites and US-style liberals to the followers of Hindenberg (sic) is beyond idiotic.

Trevor,

Chris made a historical analogy.

As someone who probably knows a bit more about Ossietzky and Weimar and the Nazis than he does I pointed out several logical fallacies in it (none of which he has chosen to address BTW).

And believe it or not it is quite possible to despise Assange (with the caveat that most of both the pro- and anti- stuff that is flooding the media and blogosphere is now propaganda and he may actually turn out to be either far more or far less despicable than he currently appears) while being very deeply concerned about the attacks on free speech that are now under way.

And how on earth can you interpret an admittedly rather tenuous point about Assange effectively destabilising Obama and this being a bad thing as being the work of some Fox News spin doctor.

And Chris, if you are going to use the blog to mount personal attacks on other bloggers and employ obviously dubious historical analogies then you can expect at least some pushback.

In the end I just happen to think Gene is right to compare Ossietzky to Liu Xiabo (they both got the Nobel Peace Prize while languishing in totalitarian dungeons for fuck’s sake!) and you are wrong to compare him to Assange just to score a minor political point.

OK I may have gone over the top in my response but IMO this isn’t a ‘normal’ Crooked Timber post but a literally ad hominem attack on someone I just happen to know personally – and so different rules apply.

Attack Gene and HP on virtually anything else and I’ll as likely as not agree with you – but you are wrong here.

Charlie,

A good general point.

But I wasn’t just negatively comparing the truly heroic Ossietsky to the inarguably rather unheroic figure of Assange – I was pointing out that Ossietzky was not imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis for doing anything like what Assange has just done but for being a well-known leftist who was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The 1929 publication of military secrets and the 1931 trial had actually nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis as the offence took place under a social-democratic led coalition government in a profoundly different political context.

And literally that is all I am trying to say here.

I love watching a good political and personal vendetta as much as anyone but as an audience we have a right to occasionally protest when one of the participants hits below the belt.

Chris,

I may well know marginally more about the politics of the Weimar Republic than you do but you undoubtedly know vastly more about the philosophy of logic than myself – so you are no doubt right that I am pointing out dissimilarities rather than actual logical fallacies.

So perhaps you could elaborate on where our disagreement really is?

As I see it:

1. Gene argues that Ossietzky is indeed like Liu Xiabao as an imprisoned dissident awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (this is incidentally hardly an original th0ught of Gene’s as it seems to have figured in virtually every media report of Liu’s award).

2. Gene published his argument on a group blog that you and I both disagree with politcally (albeit probably for rather different reasons which we hardly need to go into here).

3. This blog (though not necessarily Gene himself) has also published pieces highly critical of Assange and Wikileaks.

4. You point out Ossietzky was a campaigning journalist who released state secrets and was tried and jailed for it.

5. So if Ossietzky is like Assange, it is radically inconsistent for HP to publishing pieces praising O and denigrating A.

6. This inconsistency is yet more evidence of the general ideological and moral bankruptcy of Gene, HP and ‘the Decent Left’ to which they claim to belong.

So your argument rests on the assumption (which is understandable if not defensible if the only thing you have read about Ossietzky is the brief and misleading wikipedia article you cite as your source) that the persecution of Ossietzky by the Nazis was due to his release of state secrets.

But in fact it wasn’t – he released them 4 years before the Nazis came to power under a social democratic led government and was given what appears to have been a fair trial, jailed for a surprisingly and released from prison well before 30 January 1933.

And when the Nazis arrested him and sent him to a concentration camp it was not because he was a convicted spy and traitor but because he was one of the many thousands of prominent leftists and liberals rounded up and placed into ‘protective custody’ after the Reichstag fire.

As the Nazis specifically changed German law to allow such cases to be re-opened it would have been completely in their power to re-sentence and execute Ossietzky for his 1929 offence but they never bothered to do so.

So unless Assange is at some future date imprisoned, tortured and killed by some totalitarian government where is your analogy?

Roger,

‘Ossietzky was famous for writing about the ‘decent left’ of his own time that couldn’t stomach the unpatriotic radicals and viewed Hindenberg much the way the Harry’s place people viewed Bush, Rumsfeld, et. al.’

Please,please elaborate (perhaps translating the German next time?)

Who were these decent leftists of Ossietzky’s time?

How many countries did they illegally invade when they were in power?

Kindly enumerate for us the many and oh so obvious similarities between Generalfeldmarschal Paul von Hindenburg and George W Bush and those between Donald Rumsfeld and Generals von Seeckt, Groner and Schleicher?

So is Gene the Ernst Jünger and David T really the Carl Schmitt of our era?

Chris is a serious intellectual who I happen to radically disagree with on some issues – you however are a complete joke and clearly have nothing of value to say.

And I am the Roger who is ‘tolerated’ here?

Ossietzky was famous for writing about the ‘decent left’ of his own time that couldn’t stomach the unpatriotic radicals and viewed Hindenberg much the way the Harry’s place people viewed Bush, Rumsfeld, et. al.

To see the way the Harry’s Place people really viewed Bush and Rumsfeld, insert their names in the search box at the upper right of our blog.

Besides which, it’s the indiscriminate nature of the WikiLeaks release that Harry’s Place has objected to– including the names of people whose lives may now be in danger from such folks as the Taliban, who are not known for their mercy or forgiveness.

As I understand it, the information on German rearmament revealed by Ossietzky did not endanger any lives.

Besides which, it’s the indiscriminate nature of the WikiLeaks release that Harry’s Place has objected to—including the names of people whose lives may now be in danger from such folks as the Taliban, who are not known for their mercy or forgiveness.

This ‘indiscriminate nature’ thing has been thoroughly debunked. Wikileaks has partnered with several well established newspapers and there is evidently both an editorial strategy and a redaction policy in place. Which is not to claim perfection for any of these outfits; it’s simply to say that they do in fact discriminate. You don’t post much about the New York Times on Harry’s Place (I did a quick search): they too have a whistle-blowing history (Ellsberg; Pentagon Papers). And they’re still getting away with it! So what is it about Wikileaks that you don’t like, really?

Another Roger 12.11.10 at 2:05 pm

” Barry,

Who heads the US government right now?”

So you don’t have a shred of evidence.

And so far Assange has not actually been charged for anything other than hurting the feelings of some Swedish ladies.

No.

However politically motivated the decision to vigorously pursue the charges, Assange is, in fact, charged with rape. And though this has nothing whatsoever to do with evaluating the ethics of wikileaks, we shouldn’t minimize that fact.

If Wikileaks is still to be censured, in your book, why not the New York Times, Le Monde, et al.? All of them are still fully capable of making errors of judgement of the sort you say Assange made.

I say? I was quoting from The New York Times.

Comparing Ellsberg to PFC Bradley Manning (who is the only real whistleblower here) just brings out the real ‘first time as tragedy, second time as farce’ aspects of this case.

Ellsberg was a war criminal himself who had played a direct part in developing and implementing the policies that killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam and was rather surprised to be left at liberty after he finally summoned up the courage to do the right thing.

PFC Manning is a pathetic high school drop-out whose meteoric career trajectory went Oklahoma pizza delivery boy-intelligence analyst(!)-prisoner facing a potentially very long lifetime in solitary confinement.

I remain to be convinced that the Afghan data was fully redacted (if journalists in Kabul tell us that the Taliban see it as a 1,800 name hit list then I need rather more than an unreferenced claim that redaction took place from some random commenter), but even if it was did Assange really protect his source?

Given the certainty that this clearly very naive and ignorant young man would be unmasked within days of the first documents being released, nothing short of multiple fake passports, radical plastic surgery and a safe house somewhere like Iran or North Korea could constitute proper protection.

But arranging that would have looked a lot like conspiracy so Wikileaks seem to have done nothing whatsoever for him – in fact allegedly (and so much in this case is dubious) they haven’t even delivered on a promise to fund his defence case.

This for me undermines the case for Assange being any sort of journalist – even if we probably will be forced to support the noble lie that he is one just to limit the damage that will be done to free speech before he is brought down.

We are not quite at that point yet – so we can at least take this short interval before the shit really hits the fan to discuss it openly before we all have to close ranks and pretend that this preening Australian egomaniac with his defective rubber johnnies is in fact a modern day reincarnation of Tom Paine and Carl von Ossietzky.

Charlie,

You can’t just keep saying something and assuming that we’ll believe you – you must provide references.

It’s what your copy and paste function and the command are for.

Actually, your questions are extremely easy to answer, another R. First, of course, there was no question of the charge being trumped up – Weltbuhne really revealed a state secret, the building of a military capability that violated the Versailles treaty. N

Next up: who were the decent leftists, and were they like Junger and Schmitt? You must be kidding. Junger and Schmitt were and are, among other things, famous writers – Junger is among the best German writers of the twentieth century – and Gene and David T. are, well, as writers on a par with those who praise Britney Spears in Tiger Beat.
This is one of the hallmarks of the decent left style – the absolute lack of proportion. Which is wrapped up with the cult of self-heroization. Thus, the idea that we are in a “dark dark time” where we have to be ‘careful’ – as though WWII were raging outside. The Junger and Schmitt question, with the assumption that these bloggers are “world historical personalities”, has something very comic about it – like that bit in Spinal Tap when the lead singer compares the group to Shelley and Byron.

We are talking more like small fry writing in Stresseman’s Rheinische Zeitung and trying to get the “left” to honor soldiers. Here, from Wikipedia, is a beautiful protoform decentism – a letter from decent SPD militants to Ossietzky at the Weltbuehne.

Charakteristisch für Rezeption und Wirkung der Weltbühne sowie Ton und Inhalt der damaligen Debatten ist folgende „Antwort“, die die Kritik eines sozialdemokratischen Blattes an der Weltbühne wiedergibt:
„Volksblatt für Halle. Du hast dich über uns geärgert und schreibst nun: „In der ‚Weltbühne‘, die sich „Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst, Wirtschaft“ nennt polemisiert ein gewisser Carl von Ossietzky gegen den Kieler Parteitag. Er sieht sich zwar zur Behauptung gezwungen, daß die Partei nicht zu erschüttern sei, dafür nennt er sie jedoch aus Rache ungeistig. Wenn wir auch das individualistisch-anarchistische Kaffeehaus-Literatentum, das sich in dieser Zeitschrift breitmacht, nicht für Politik nehmen, so ist es doch von Wichtigkeit, gelegentlich auf die infolge erstaunlicher geistiger Zuchtlosigkeit sich dort breitmachenden Anwürfe gegen alle und alles aufmerksam zu machen, da das Blatt merkwürdigerweise auch hier und dort im Kreis Organisierter gelesen wird. Der demokratische Reichstagsabgeordnete Erkelenz charakterisierte „Die Weltbühne“ kürzlich einmal sehr richtig, indem er schrieb: Was für Männer in Deutschland auch immer zu irgendeiner Zeit herrschen mögen, in kürzester Frist werden sie insgesamt, ohne Unterschied der Partei, von der „Weltbühne“ so madig gemacht sein, daß kein Hund ein Stück Brot von ihnen nimmt. Das zur Einleitung des nachstehenden Artikels.“ Der nachstehende Artikel aber beginnt: „Die Sozialdemokraten als die größte geistige Strömung der heutigen Zeit …“ Da kann man nix machen.“
– „Antworten“, in: Die Weltbühne, 7. Juni 1927, S. 920

The faction that hated the pacifists – the rightwingers in the SPD – are the spiritual forefathers of the decent leftists.
But it is difficult to name members of that faction, since they all, without exception, have been forgotten. As I assume the decents will

“and it transpires that his offence was committed in 1929 when Weimar was still a model democracy and the Chancellor was social democrat Hermann Muller.”

Allow me to laugh. The entire judicary system was run by democracy hateing rigth wingers that got their jobs pre democracy and the president – lets not forget, Weimar was a presidential system with an incredible powerfull president – was a senile democracy hateing ex general.

As I understand it, the information on German rearmament revealed by Ossietzky did not endanger any lives.

Of course it did. Had there been an armed clash between the Weimar Republic and France or Poland, which was at that time a remote but real possibility, German pilots would have faced greater risk. It is possible that foreign intelligence agencies already knew about what he wrote, but the court could hardly ask them, nor is the notion, that a foreign power might take intelligence from multiple sources more serious, stupid.

Roger,

You really don’t understand the concept of irony do you?

And I am no real expert (and can’t even read German without a dictionary close to hand) – but I can name any number of ‘right-wing’ SPDers from this era – not a few of who paid for their ‘decency’ in Nazi concentration camps.

In fact SPD resisters like Leber and Reichwein are not just unforgotten in Germany – they have schools and whatever named after them.

And without the 1928-29 SPD finance minister Hilferding’s pioneering work before WW1 Lenin would have had no one to plagiarise when writing his Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism

In fact reading you I am painfully reminded of Nabokov’s piece ‘The Other Nabokov’ where he bemoans sharing a name with a viciously reactionary anti-semitic monarchist emigre for whom he is constantly mistaken.

Maybe you should let me know what other comment boxes you frequent so I can make sure that none of my friends (and for that matter enemies) make the same mistake?

The 1992 court ruling looks like the wedge–if you like that ruling, it’s kind of awkward (though not impossible) to use Ossietzky as a stick to bash China with. This is awkwardness is still there even though Ossietzky’s actions in that case weren’t why Ossietzky wasn’t persecuted by Nazis or awarded a Nobel–approving of that ruling means that Ossietzky’s earlier, shorter imprisonment was just, and he was a criminal. And why should China be embarrassed that their dissident received a prize if Nobel prizes have previously gone to criminals?

If you don’t like that ruling, then you can’t really approve of any prosecution of WikiLeaks or Assuange.

Bugger. it didn’t come up that way on preview!

HIDARI FOR THE WIN!!!

I think the point about saving real lives (Another Roger @29, end) is more directly relevant than many who condemn the revealing of informers’ identities seem to assume: after all, these informers are – no doubt for the usual variety of reasons – directly arranging for those (Taliban or other) who are opposing the US and their allies to be killed by the invading power, aren’t they. And that power is well-known to act on such information without checking it carefully, and when it does so act, to be willing to inflict large amounts of ‘collateral damage’.

And as Another Roger perhaps seems to suggest, the less cooperation the US get from the locals, the sooner they might be convinced to stop turning the meatgrinder and actually withdraw, rather than doing what is headlined as withdrawing, but glossed as ceasing active hostilities (i.e. going abck inside those citadels and letting others do the fighting) and accompanied by the statement – cheekily presented as a generous concession – that ‘the Afghans’ won’t be left in the lurch – i.e. the US are not in fact going away.

Unfortunately I suspect that the very fact that has prevented the US from committing sufficient ground troops (and coffins) to the project of comprehensively winning the war, and which might even provide a perverse incentive for them to avoid doing so – viz., I suspect, that they are only really interested in having a permanent garrison – probably means that they won’t be getting out whatever happens, nor allowing the local power struggles to play themselves out to a cessation of hostilities. (Or maybe they are still hoping UBL will show up, so they can arrest him and go home?)

In any case, the issue of endangering the lives of informers doesn’t seem as clear cut as kneejerkers (which doesn’t seem to include Another Roger) would have it.

Needless to say that appears a pretty academic issue given that the huge effort that must be going into finding and trumpeting a Wikileak-related fatality doesn’t seem to have has any success. And the US government’s refusal to provide objections when requested means – if I have this right – that they would bear at least some responsibility for such an event. (Come to think of it, maybe that means they aren’t so keen to find an actual example as I suggested they must be).

But Ossietzky may have been a pacifist but he he wasn’t an idiot.

He didn’t advocate that Britain and France invade Germany because it was secretly re-arming (and in fact he just about lived long enough to see them do fuck all about it when Germany tore up Versailles and started openly re-arming).

As I said you can’t massively subsidise an unfeasibly large civilian airfleet and numerous glider clubs and pilot schools without this becoming obvious to any attentive outside observer – so everyone who mattered knew what was going on and more to the point knew that everyone else knew.

In fact IIRC bourgeois politicians in the West were rather more worried in 1929 about Germany’s military weakness in the face of the Bolshevik menace than they were of any new Teutonic rampage, so it seems hardly credible that they would have done anything effective even if they had taken official cognisance of what Ossietzky and co. were telling them.

And of course the people who brought it to their attention and made it an international cause celebre were the Reichswehr themselves as they could hardly charge Ossietzky in an open court with revealing military secrets about Germany breaking its treaties unless those secrets were true…but even then the West did nothing.

Ossietzky’s real crime was exposing the Black Reichswehr and its murderous operations earlier in the 1920s.

But as there was obvious way to prosecute him for that they cobbled together a treason and espionage case which they found so difficult to make stick that he was given what was by the standards of Weimar’s legendarily biased courts a nominal sentence and then released in a political amnesty before he’d served more than a fraction of it.

The argument that he ‘endangered German lives’ is thus an absurd one.

All the Ossietzky case really illustrates is that history is terribly complicated and strip mining it for simplistic analogies to score petty political points is a waste of intelligent people’s time.

So Chris evidently idolises Assange, his bete noirs at Harry’s Place evidently hate him (I never go there any more so will take Chris’s word for it) – as for me I am genuinely perplexed by it all and really, really doubt that it is going to work out well for anyone other than perhaps for the very satanic forces that Assange is deluded enough to think he can bring down through the power of the interwebs.

But who wants to see dirty shades of gray when everything can be reduced to black and white…

The relation between Assange and Ossietzky is not clear to me either. I think we would agree that Ossietzky had a legal and moral duty to not reveal military secrets, even if we don’t agree about whether he really did reveal secrets.
But Julian Assange is an Australian citizen acting outside the US. Why would he be under any obligation to keep US secrets secret? For Australia his actions are arguably marginally beneficial as Australians now know what an important other countries really think about certain things.
The Australian government might be embarrassed or may think he hurt Australian interests. But that’s a matter between him and Australia.

A. Roger, what to say to a man who continuously imitates donald duck? It is difficult to debate with a straight face. However, I am glad that you decided that I was anti-semitic too! But really, why restrain yourself? Obviously I’m a neo-nazi supporter of Saddam Hussein!

This after all wouldn’t be a decent decentist thread without the glorious anti-semitic charge.

Now your comparison has changed – probably due to your masterful use of irony – and you are no longer accusing me of some bizarre comparison of the decent with the main writers of the conservative revolution – which makes no sense and has little to do with the politics of the SPD and the military – but instead, they are like SPD militants thrown into concentration camps! Donald Duck puts on his helmet and charges, once more, up the hill.

To translate the main sentence from the SPD sheet that responded to Ossietzky’s critique of the party: „In der ‚Weltbühne‘, die sich „Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst, Wirtschaft“ nennt polemisiert ein gewisser Carl von Ossietzky gegen den Kieler Parteitag. Er sieht sich zwar zur Behauptung gezwungen, daß die Partei nicht zu erschüttern sei, dafür nennt er sie jedoch aus Rache ungeistig. Wenn wir auch das individualistisch-anarchistische Kaffeehaus-Literatentum, das sich in dieser Zeitschrift breitmacht, nicht für Politik nehmen, so ist es doch von Wichtigkeit – In the Weltbuehne, which calls itself a weekly for politics, art and the economy, a certain Carl von Sooeitzky polemicizes against the Kiel Party conference. He actually finds himself forced to make observations since the party is not to be shaken – and out of revenge he calls it unintellectual. Even if we dont’ take the individualistic-anarchistic coffee house literature [the equivalent today would be hipsters], that spreads itselves out in this magazine, for politics, it would still be of some importance…”

The coffeehouse intellectual shot would fit right into Harry’s place.
Anyway, you can donaldduck away about the insult to the poor Harry’s writers, threatened on all sides with imminent martyrdom, Another R., since it is entertaining. As to where I comment, it is of course the NeoNazis r us quarterly, the I heart SaddamHussein blog, and of course the Tearingdownalldecencyandinsultingourbravedecentistsinthesedarkdarktimes weekly.

#63, that was about an earlier document dump, not the latest one.

@63: the “1800 names” thing refers to the earlier document dump. You can tell this because you refer to Kabul.

Gene and others, here you go. I thought this was common knowledge.

We’re talking about Weimar Liberalism at our website too.

http://www.mimdown.org/agitation/antifa/index.html