The 1998 Reichstag elections ended an era. Since 1945, the Federal Republic never has had a government change triggered by elections. Then, the conservative Cold War era leader Helmut Kohl was replaced with the Social-Democrat Gerhard Schröder. The numbed political elite, which for decades had been coined by the Nazi continuity, finally was resurfaced with a fresh bunch of leaders.

This generation came out of the core of the 1968 Radical Movements and until 9/11 could be considered as one of the most successful career cliques that ever abandoned the Left. Inspired by an odd amalgamation of revolutionary and anti-Western ideas, Schröder succeeded with a political marketing hoax: The 1968ers in power sold imperial Sonderweg ideas as Antifascist modernization. With weeny unburdening coming as moral strength, they had found the Orwellian way to cope with national history.

In contrast to the Kohl system, domestic affairs were subordinated to foreign policy instead of tradition. The effective difference was marginal, dissent straitened to anti-immigration details. Finally, the Conservatives stopped stigmatizing the 1968ers in power as Leftists when George W. Bush took office in January 2001. Foreign Minister Fischer, with three decades of experience in keeping the souvereignity over the airspace in the Left, had marginalized all critics. The Schröder system successively achieved what Steven Erlanger, correspondent to the New York Times, had called "more responsibility in Europe", while the Student Movement Coordination Commitee for a Democratic Iran described it as "the logistic demilitarized zone of international terrorism".

The story of the Berlin Republic is the story of three successful lawyers once defending the former Palestinian-trained terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) group: Otto Schily, who now is Minister of Interiour, Christian Ströbele, who now is the Reichstag deputy representing the Peace camp, and Horst Mahler, who now leads the Nazi camp. These men are the political skeleton of current Germany.

The publisher Rudolf Augstein, who died in 2002, had been a childhood friend of Uri Avnery in the 1920s. His Spiegel newsmagazine wrote in February 2002: "There is a photo showing the three together in a Berlin courtroom. Mahler, in the middle, speaking, Ströbele and Schily turned towards him, listening. It is 1972. Mahler is sued as a member of the RAF group, the two others are his defenders. The trio on the photo had a shared goal. They saw the state as a preserver of societal imparity, as a vassal of America. They wanted another republic. Though they were disagreeing about the way there. ... About 30 years later they cover the whole political spectrum of the Federal Republic. Ströbele is the imperturbable left, Schily the arch-burgeois in the middle, Mahler the extreme right racist."

Mahler is the only "lawyers collective" member who personally got involved in terrorism. Then, on the peak of the RAF activities in 1977, the government of the Ex-Wehrmacht officer Helmut Schmidt introduced a customized law. By banning collective defense in group crime proceedings, the "lawyers collective" was washed up. Though never giving up his claims on the fathership of the RAF, Horst Mahler turned away and found a new defender. An unknown young lawyer from the Social-Democratic Party youth organization specialized on his case and in 1988 succeeded in restoring Mahlers concession. His name is Gerhard Schröder.

Schröders first term of office was coined by two huge political campaigns which enveloped all other domestic debates. In winter 1999, the conservative party was shattered by the collapse of the Kohl system, a network of distributing bribe to organize party consent. Most of it came from a Fuchs tank deal with Saudi Arabia in 1990 (the same tanks Schröder denied to Israel), where the House of Saud had paid a fivefold market price, including € 110 Mio. for "provisions and useful expenditures". The then German arms export law had a regulation which allowed bribe to be paid in the customers country, so Kohl arranged the deal for Thyssen-Krupp, the former Kaiser's cannon manufacturer, but paid the bribe at home. Current CDU leaders still are the rubble from that system, like Roland Koch, who recently won the Hessen state elections. Koch had a quite inventive idea to explain his hidden sources of money and said it came from Jewish inheritances. The parliamentary board of inquiry Schröder had set up to clear the corruption affair was headed by Christian Ströbele, who in 1991 had stated that "the Iraqi missile attacks are the logical, if not coactive consequence from the Israeli policy". As a result, the public debate focussed on the conservative party and consequently avoided any analysis of the Role of the House of Saud.

In summer 2000, a bomb on Düsseldorf-Werhahn urban railway station hurted ten Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and killed a baby. Finally, the Nazi camp got public attention. In the 1990s, it had become hold of the souveignity over the airspace of the streets of more and more East German rural areas. Trapped in quarrels, it increasingly benefited from an inflow of 1968er renegades who were manufacturing new consent. Though appearently not linked to the bomb, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) then was its most promising organization. The explosion triggered an extensive debate among politicians whether to ban that party. Horst Mahler announced his defense of their case against the Minister of Interiour Otto Schily. Yet before the Reichstag had made a decision, an attack by Palestinian immigrants against a Düsseldorf synagogue triggered a huge manifestation at the Berlin Brandenburg gate, promoting patriotic moral courage against extremism but blindspotting the Intifada context. At the same time, Horst Mahler and a few other Nazi ideologists relaunched the 1994-founded Deutsches Kolleg as a think tank of the fascist right. The parliament passed the decision on to the Federal Consitutional Court, where the NPD proceeding is still pending, as it became an outing of intelligence service collaborators in the party.

The Deutsches Kolleg published several declarations explaining its political views, including some on 9/11. As a lawyer specialized to the Volksverhetzung law, which criminalizes cataloged forms of hatespeech if public impact is proven, Horst Mahler knows how to sail around the crags of the Paragraph 130 without crippling his message. Partly together with Reinhold Oberlercher and Uwe Meenen, he authored these statements, which are coined by a reference to World War I that had been an unusual historical concept even in the Nazi camp.

On Sept 9, 2002 in Mainz, Mahler was convicted to pay an € 7.200 fine for "approval of crimes" in one of the declarations. A similiar statement given to the Panorama TV magazine on Sept 20, 2001 resulted in Mahler being sued in Hamburg. After he refused to pay a penalty order of € 6.000, a trial was announced for Jun 10, 2002 but then postponed to Oct 28, 2002. As Mahler appeared at a discussion of the Wahhabist Hizb ut Tahrir group the day before and the event made it into the news, this session was also postponed. A third try was made on Jan 13, 2003 and postponed again. Two days later, Schily banned the Hizb ut Tahrir group, but more to prove his iron hands than to make Wahhabism an issue in public debates. The word had not even been in the news, and the Mahler lawsuit was not put in that context.

Mahler stated about Schröder: "In public, he still must conceal what really moves him." Maybe Mahler requires to be considered as a bit more candid. Possible, that one could say these writings were the worst thing in Europe.

25.03.2001: Mahler: Final Solution of the Jewish Question (2)
12.09.2001: Mahler: Independence Day Live (2)
21.09.2001: Mahler: 11 September 2001 - Cui Bono? (2)
01.11.2001: Oberlercher/Mahler/Meenen: The Fall of the Judeo-American Empire (2)

Please also read the article from which I borrowed the headline.