Toby on Tuesday

'Hertz and Hegemony'

Today I’d like to write about the BBC, or “Auntie” as she became known in the 1930’s (“Auntie knows best”) or the Beeb as Peter Sellers first called her.  But of course Auntie doesn’t know best and has always completely misjudged events on the Continent, not least in Germany.   In the 1930’s Winston Churchill was banned from the airwaves for his speeches alerting our country to the scale of German rearmament, while Lord Reith, the Beeb’s Director-General, was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler.   “I really admire the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt” he wrote in July 1934 after Hitler had had his enemies in the Nazi Party murdered.   And in 1939, after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia he declared, “Hitler continues his magnificent efficiency.”   Now all of this would be of historical interest only if Auntie’s fawning instincts were not just as strong today.   And here I want to introduce you to Joschka Fischer, the dominant figure in Germany’s Green Party, Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, Germany’s most popular politician and the leading architect of the new Europe.

Born in 1948, as a student Fischer became a member of the militant group, Revolutionarer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle).   His radical “Putzgruppe” (Cleaning Squad) – the first syllable being an acronym for “Proletarische Union fur Terror und Zerstorung” (Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction) - was involved in many a street battle and a photograph of him clubbing policeman Rainer Marx came to haunt him in later life.  In May 1981 the Hessian Secretary of Commerce was murdered with a firearm that in 1973 had been carried in Fischer’s car.   He maintained that he had given the car to the terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein so that Klein could fit it with a new engine.   Fischer then immersed himself in Germany’s nascent Green Party, being elected to the Bundestag in 1983.   His influence and popularity in Germany grew exponentially to the point where he was able in 1996 to write his first autobiography, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen” (We are the Mad Ones).   In this he declared, “Germany should now, as it has become peaceful and reasonable, get all that Europe and the whole world has refused in two gigantic wars – a sort of smooth hegemony over Europe.   A Superior Power that it is entitled to by its large size, its economic strength and its position.”   And two years later after the September 1998 elections, although the Greens had won just 7% of the votes, Fischer succeeded in negotiating a role for himself in Gerhard Schroder’s Social Democratic Government as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany.   The rest is history.

By 2005, he had opened the floodgates to new immigration into Europe by relaxing visa regulations for Ukraine, which his critics argued would allow illegal immigrants into Germany with fake identities   And after leaving office in 2005 his zeal has in no way lessened.   Now, along with his grisly gang of old friends, Jacques Delors, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Guy Verhofstadt and the rest, Fischer is running the so-called Spinelli group to push for yet more EU integration.   Last June, in an interview of embarrassing obsequiousness by the Beeb’s Europe editor Katya Adler, Fischer took the opportunity to say to David Cameron, “Don’t lose yourself in wishful thinking.   Angela Merkel will do nothing which will endanger the basic principle of the common market, of the EU...It would be an illusion to think that the UK would get special treatment because it is a major contributor to the EU budget.”   The voice of the Superior Power, first enunciated in Fischer’s 1996 autobiography, was as clear as ever.   But at least Britain has UKIP to question the narrative of Auntie Beeb’s Euro-federalists.   And in the 1930’s, we were lucky too in a robust anti-appeaser Conservative MP called Captain Leonard Plugge.   He got round Auntie’s monopoly by the simple expedient of creating his own radio station in France, Radio Normandy, broadcasting into Britain from a transmitter at Fecamp on the Channel coast.   Thanks to Radio Normandy Winston Churchill’s warnings were heard on this side of the Channel, to the horror of Lord Reith.   And Churchill took his revenge 20 years later when as Prime Minister he oversaw the creation of ITV as a direct challenge to Auntie’s monopoly.   But all that’s a story for another day!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby