Oskar Lafontaine's "Ami, it's time to go" [review, eng]
a slightly derailed book review
This article appears synchronized in German here
Oskar Lafontaine (b. 1943) was Minister-president of the federal state of Saarland from 1985 to 1998. Serving as the chairman of the SPD from 1995 to 1999, he resigned both from the party office as from the position as Germany’s federal minister of finance - labelled as “Europe’s most dangerous man” for his Keynesian fiscal policy approaches. After leaving the SPD and heading onto the chairmanship of the then founded Linkspartei (Left party), Lafontaine started a revenge against his former comrades, followed by the mission of tearing down Linkspartei. Playing around with right and far-right talking points since ever, Lafontaine meanwhile can be considered gone fully bonkers. Lafontaine published his new book in November 2022.
So at first it was logical to safely ignore this book, which came onto the market in November 2022. The comment "14€ for 60 pages? That's an impertinence" by Tobias Huch, I was again painfully reminded of this booklet, with which Oskar Lafontaine, in terms of title and content, wants to do nothing less than raise the Kumbaya of the West German peace movement of the last fifty years to a new level.
New does not mean better. It doesn't even mean consistent. It's just disgusting.
"Yank, it's time to go! Plea for European Self-Assertion" is, without knowing (let alone being able to know) the vast market of political non-fiction, by far the most gruesome of them all.
It really is so bad that it will be difficult to approach this booklet with the required degree of minimum neutrality.
I particularly disliked the first ("No nuclear war in Europe!") and the second ("We must free ourselves from the tutelage of the USA") as well as the third and last chapter ("Thoughts on war").
Lafontaine works from front to back with a frenzied rage of the kind that can really only be found in this form on the political right-wing fringe: Enemy marking and savage insults of the political opponent alternate with misogyny, with misinformation and disinformation. In a consistent friend-foe scheme, even anti-Semitic dog-whistling is not shied away from.
But from the beginning.
With a "let me through, I'm a physicist", Lafontaine first spans the field between him as a supposedly rational debater and the others who simply muddle around politically because they have no feeling for the reality check of a theory or thesis by means of experiment. With this vulgar Popperism, Lafontaine firstly clearly positions himself as an authoritarian and secondly reveals that he has understood nothing at all in his almost eighty years of life.1
The well-read do not believe in Russia's sole guilt anyway. They remember Gorbachev's promise not to expand NATO eastwards.
Although Gorbachev, the supposed key witness of this assertion, has distanced himself from it, as did Helmut Kohl's foreign policy advisor at the time, Horst Teltschik, it does not matter that this myth is perpetuated and maintained.
The incarnate Gorbachev on ZDF's heute journal on 8th November 2014:
One should consider the following: at that time NATO and the Warsaw Pact existed. What should one fix to this?
The fact that Horst Teltschik also contradicted this legend or that, from an analytical point of view, one has to doubt such a historically relevant influence of the statement of US Secretary of State Baker (not to mention that of the West German Foreign Minister Genscher) is of course not able to convince the well-read Lafontaine and his fellow readers.
If, like Lafontaine and the presumed addressees, one considers literacy to be higher education, then it is of course permissible to leave out dispute and discourse, deliberation and (Aristotelian) dialectics - in other words, thousands of years of acquired and honed cultural and intellectual techniques together with the painstakingly assembled toolboxes of heuristics, hermeneutics, logics and razor blades.
To apply one of the most effective tools in working with alternative history narratives, let's take Hitchen's Razor: what can be asserted without evidence can also be contradicted without evidence.
Assertion: Slowly but surely the mood in the Federal Republic is tilting.
Rebuttal: No. It's so easy.
To conclude this little digression and introduction, perhaps in words that "the physicist" Lafontaine would understand: What he is doing here "argumentatively" would be in line with the practice of eliminating all measurement data in his experiments that do not agree with his thesis as "background noise", "artefact" or "statistical outlier" and selling the remaining result as honest science.
(He is forgiven for the fact that the Nicolo Machiavelli he cites was actually a Niccolò - this should not really happen to the publisher, on top of which one can consider Niccolò a calculating cynic or realpolitik politician, but Gorilla then goes too far).
The book continues with a wild stroll through the entire shop of alternative facts and stories: From the perfidious plan to station nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe (which never happened and - so far - was never planned), from the "coup" on the Maidan (yawn), from the vassalage of Germany (which did not go into Iraq in 2003 and abstained on Syria in the UNSC in 2011) to the progressive militarisation and "occupation" by the US (which reduced its troop numbers in Germany from 300,000 to 60,000 from 1990 to today).
Let's focus on three leading talking points that run through the whole booklet from front to back (all subsequent references go to the e-book version).
1. ad hominem/ misanthropy as an argument.
And here it really is ad hominem and not sophistry or the like that is meant. Lafontaine consistently engages in systematic devaluation of individuals and groups.
- For example, journalists who deal with the thesis of Russian perpetration of the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines around 26 September 2022 are "completely stupid" (p. 14).
- For years, the Greens have gone along with "this propaganda of lies", that allegedly the USA is silent about war crimes while Russia is denounced (p. 15);
- The latter is shown by the fact that the Greens have repeatedly invited the former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (ibid.), who has in fact incurred heavy guilt with the continued sanctions against Iraq as a result of the First Gulf War - which must have encouraged Lafontaine to call Albright a "child murderer" (p. 16). The fact that Albright was born a Jewish child into the Körbel family in Prague in 1937 and only learned of these roots, as well as of her three grandparents who were murdered in the Shoah, in the 1990s should not have escaped the "well-read" Lafontaine. (But to call a Jewish woman a "child murderer" in the country of the perpetrators would of course either not be a scandal or not even meant that way and in any case totally perfidious to accuse someone of such a thing).
- What is really scandalous for Lafontaine, on the other hand, is when Federal Foreign Minister Baerbock said with regard to the sanctions that they wanted to "ruin Russia" with them, because that "is the language of fascism!"2 (S. 16). Who does not remember the Nazis' war of extermination against the Poles through the blanket Bigos embargo?
- "Ms Baerbock and the rest of the US command underlings in Berlin" (p. 20) are simply too stupid to understand that, for example, Russia has no troops standing on the Canadian border. That Russia would actually have to have troops in the USA for this (among other sources: earth.google.com ) is so funny. However, the fact that Russia has troops swimming on the border with Canada has been a well-known security problem for more than ten years, on which the British and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have positioned themselves sufficiently and unambiguously, and which has recently also been understood as a joint problem of Canada and Norway (see here, here, there). The fact that this has disrupted any cooperation within the framework of the civil international order (Arctic Council) for years and has been largely interrupted since 2022 - this does not concern Oskar.
- "Either Ms. Strack-Zimmermann has a similar intelligence quotient as Ms. Baerbock or she knows exactly what nonsense she is talking and says everything her contacts in the arms industry lead her" (p. 21). Regardless of how "well-read" one has to be to think the prayer leader is the most powerful guy in the congregation: This sentence simply stands for itself in its misogyny.
- "In her [Strack-Zimmermann's, ed.] electoral disctrict, Düsseldorf I, there also happens to be the headquarters of Rheinmetall" (ibid.). A quick check. That's right. But what is also in the same disctrict is, for example, the "Bobbolino indoor playground", the kebab restaurant "Alanya" (4.6 out of 5.0 satisfaction!) and the "German Shepherd Association".
- "Ursula von der Leyen, a top German politician of the quality of Annalena Baerbock" (p. 24). Both women, both mothers, both from Lower Saxony. Oskar is on the trail of something big.
2. "But the Ostpolitik / Men".
As we have cursorily noted, for the "well-read", women are not only the weak sex, but also the evil, vicious and therefore defiantly violent sex. Men, on the other hand, are diplomatic, empathetic and want peace.
- "We miss a politician like Willy Brandt today" (p. 20). We do. Not Oskar. Perhaps the imagined one, who supposedly would still have flinched if the unthinkable emergency had occurred during his time in office. But not the historical Brandt, who was more in line with the facts, who spent 3.4% of GDP on the Bundeswehr when he took office and 3.3% when he left office; who made Schmidt (until 1972) the intellectual and practical father of the Bundeswehr in the interior and Leber (from 1972) the great moderniser of the Bundeswehr (establishment of Bundeswehr universities in Hamburg and Munich, enlargement of the army, opening up the Bundeswehr to women) federal ministers of defence.
- "But Willy Brandt's wayward great-grandchildren recently prefer to talk about Germany being a leading power" (p. 22). Regardless of whether the grandchildren of historian Prof. Dr. Peter Brandt or actor Matthias Brandt are or will be actually wayward - the times when the Federal Republic could do good business everywhere without making itself straight for the consequences of this business should be well recognised and finally (yes) over.
- "The policy of détente was abandoned and replaced by a policy of confrontation" (p. 8). Neither was the one abandoned, nor did the other take its place. How confrontational the situation was was shown by the mutual willingness of NATO and the Soviet Union to turn Thuringia and Hesse into a nuclear ground zero for tactical reasons in the worst acceptable case of war. What was replaced was the understanding of the term "change" in "change through trade". What was supposed to lead to a change in the socio-political climate of the "Eastern Bloc" in the 1970s through, among other things, UN accession of both Germany, the Grundlagenvertrag and the Deutschlandvertrag, as well as the CSCE Final Act, gave way to a role reversal until recently: If we want the good deal on cheap raw materials, then we have to change.
- "following Charles de Gaulle's example" (p. 16), we should chase the Americans from the courtyard; which he never did. Conversely, he chased himself from courtyard with France's withdrawal from NATO's military structures.
- "Klaus von Dohnanyi, the former first3 [!] mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, has written a very good book" (p. 18). Nope (see above, Hitchen's Razor).
- Regarding the deployment of the Pershing-II, Lafontaine remembers himself saying during that time: "Brezhnev - that was the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR at the time - had not even got off the toilet when the missile already hit the Kremlin" (p. 18f.). He is confusing things. Asleep on the toilet he probably meant.
- The last Soviet General Secretary [i.e. Gorbachev, ed.] loved people, he did not want war, he did not want conflict, he dreamed of the European house" (p. 21). Indeed, Gorbachev loved people, his love was so overwhelming that he had Soviet love tanks roll over Lithuanian Soviet people yearning for love in Vilnius on 13 January 1991, for example, to prove it.
3. bad men, MAGA, NATO and "the Nazis are everyone else" narratives.
If someone had said before November 2022 that Lafontaine and his ideological followers had taken leave of their senses and were no longer far from the right-wing fringe of the so-called Western community of states in their statements and the spreading of conspiracy narratives, he would have been called a rabble-rouser and a liar.
Here you go, Oskar. The stage is yours:
- "Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of War [...] I deliberately do not say Secretary of Defence, because there is no American Secretary of Defence. After all, the USA is not attacked by any state" (p. 10). There are no children's rights in Russia either, but nevertheless there is a children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. This is the lady who parades and abuses abducted children from Mariupol as if they were in a human zoo in front of an audience of millions as "home-comings". The Hague is calling.
- "Selenskyj was put into office by an oligarch and his name appears in the Panama Papers" (p. 24). Well. Ukrainian voters put him in office with a truly remarkable 73% in the second round of voting against Petro Poroshenko. That Ukraine has a problem with corruption and oligarchs has never been denied. And that is now an argument for or against what?
- "And the nice Mr. Biden is involved in the crooked dealings of the Ukrainian oligarchy through his son Hunter" (p. 24f.). I wonder if Lafontaine's favourite pizzeria actually has a cellar?
- "Fascists who worship the Nazi collaborator Bandera" (ibid.). Bandera, who would not exist without the German occupation in Poland. Which is why Germany also has historical responsibility for Ukraine. But for which Ukraine must exist, yada yada yada.
- "I could never have imagined that German troops would be on the Russian border again" (p. 27). That the well-read is still trying to inflate NATO's 1,200-man EFP battlegroup in Lithuania under German command into a US imperialist invasion army is again fun to listen to.
- "We are so caught in an Orwellian cage, where the truth becomes a lie and the lie becomes the truth, that we no longer see much at all" (p. 15). Firstly, the use of Orwell against functioning democratic states and institutions is part of the toolkit of the new internationalist far right and secondly, Oskar, note, the Orwellian cage does not shield in thunderstorms!
- "[Johnson] induced the Ukrainian president Selenskyj not to sign this agreement [the so-called "peace settlement", ed.]" (p. 28). That this fairy tale is now recognised and named as such is as clear as it is maintained by Lafontaine and others. Interestingly, this is the only point at which he addresses the UK at all. More on that in a moment.
What remains is disgust on the one hand. On the other hand, pity. But the disgust prevails. A few examples should have made it clear what a kind of person Oskar Lafontaine has become or has always been.
Let us conclude with two theses:
1. the definition of the enemy (and this is how clearly it must be stated) is unambiguous:
It is predominantly politically green (or liberal-progressive), overwhelmingly female, Western. And thus, as if by magic, it almost coincides with the same enemy designation that the Kremlin has systematically built up since Putin's renewed and perpetuated assumption of power in the presidency since 2012, and against which the Kremlin has presumably protected a failed New York real estate entrepreneur named Donald Trump: democratic, female, western. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What Hillary Clinton is to the Kremlin, Annalena Baerbock is to the German right-wing fringe of radical right-wing parties, media, activists up to - yes - Oskar Lafontaine.
2 The idea of a European order is explicit.
This includes a strong Franco-German alliance in questions of European security policy to the exclusion (or: ejection) of the USA. Furthermore, this includes the isolation of the United Kingdom. With Brexit and the ongoing political autophagy in Westminster and 10 Downing Street, this is taking its course.
Voila. Without accusing Lafontaine of knowing it or even having read it, this is, with slight variations in concreteness, the fantasy of a Eurasian economic order from Vladivostok to Lisbon, as conceived by the radical right self-proclaimed political philosopher and Vladimir Putin's favourite madman. His name: Alexander Dugin ("Fundamentals of Geopolitics").
Finally, a few personal words. Reading this book was painful. Even though its manageable number of pages promised a quick end, every minute hurt physically. Not because the thoughts were new in their absurdity. It's more like listening to a confused regulars' table speech that could be given anywhere and everywhere in the republic between a third beer and a mob in front of a refugee shelter. As dangerous as these speeches and slogans and the implicit spaces of action they imply are: Don't read them. Unless you do it for a living, or something to do with the media, or are historians or otherwise pitiful fellow human beings.
Rather take the 14€ in your hand and indulge in a fish sandwich and a beer by the water. Or a large coffee at the bakery. Like I did afterwards. To cleanse my soul.
"14€ for 60 pages? That's an impertinence" - Dear Tobias Huch: If you only knew.
Oskar Lafontaine, “Ami, it's time to go: Plädoyer für die Selbstbehauptung Europas”, Frankfurt a.M., 2022, 64 p., 14,00€.
For the sake of fairness he did not explicitly write this.
About that: Umberto Eco, “Urfaschismus”, Die ZEIT 28/1995 vom 7. Juli 1995, https://www.zeit.de/1995/28/Urfaschismus; as well as: Victor Klemperer, Martin Brady (transl.), Language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, 4. ed., London 2016.
It is not the first Mayor (chronological) but the First Mayor (protocol).