Ethnic Cleansing in Germany: A Symposium
Germany for Germans: Identity
and Xenophobia
Barry A. Fisher
Human Rights Attorney
Past Chair, American Bar Association Religious Freedom Subcommittee
Vice-President, Human Rights Advocates International
Since the end of the Cold War, a new global picture has emerged, one not of greater global peace, but of new wars, more atrocities and increased potential for violence—all often along cataclysmic religious, ethnic and racial fault lines. After two world wars and Communism’s rise and fall, this century strikingly ends exactly where it began—with Europe’s geopolitical giant, Germany, flexing its nationalist, übermenschen muscle at those persons and beliefs deemed “un-German.”
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Germany, because of what it has done regarding Scientology, has now been criticized in more than 10 reports by official government and human rights organizations, including the United States State Department and the United Nations Human Rights Commission. |
This century is ending with fighting in Bosnia, precisely where World War I first ignited, in large part over Germanic hegemony. Then, Germany was encouraging Catholic Croatia and Slovenia to break away from Yugoslavia to ensure an alliance which Germany had sought for centuries. This century now ends, with Germany and its eastern neighbors racked with weakened economies and rife with a dramatic rise of nationalism, xenophobia, ethnic and religious hatred—all dramatically juxtaposed against the flag-waving of post-Communist Europe, European unification, and professed open borders and open societies; for economic goods and unified Euro-dollar currency; but not an open door for political, philosophical and religious ideas.
Europe east and west is, as the century ends, in turmoil of belief and political identity. The vacuum left by the fall of the old belief systems has drawn in many of the world religions, only to face the power politics and competition from the previously dominant religions now seeking their old monopolies and working with the right-wing nationalist alliances to define true national identity by specific church allegiance.
And while central and Eastern Europe swirl in
turmoil, newly reunited Germany has become the center of an escalating spiral of violence, hysteria and government actions against third-world foreigners and racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Developments in Germany explode on these multiple interrelated fronts almost on a daily basis. Only a few days ago, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Neu Zürcher Zeitung, and as anti-“cult” hysteria is sweeping Europe and the former Soviet block, Berlin’s Federal Administrative Court stripped the Jehovah’s Witnesses of tax exemption on grounds that the Church’s beliefs against various nationalistic acts such as voting in Parliamentary elections is “disloyal” and “subverts” the Constitution. Of course, mid-century,
the Jehovah’s Witnesses were one of the early targets of the German arrests and
concentration camp killings for the same reason—disloyalty.
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