The first official statement of the communist party (KPD) once legalized after World War II said, "'Not only Hitler is guilty of the crimes that have befallen humanity! Ten million Germans also bear part of the guilt, those who in 1932 in free elections voted for Hitler although we communists warned: 'Whoever votes for Hitler votes for war!'
"Part of the guilt is also borne by those German men and women who, spineless and without resistance, watched Hitler grab power, watched how he destroyed all democratic organizations, especially those of the labor movement, and locked up, tortured, and murdered the best Germans.
"Guilty are all those Germans who saw in the armaments build up a 'Greater Germany' and perceived in bestial militarism, in marches and exercises, the sole sanctifying redemption of the nation."
Then, as now, there were those who wanted to whitewash countless oppressive actions carried out by ordinary Germans during World War II--actions that in no way could ever generate humyn harmony. The guises for this were many. Some called them "exploited workers." Others clung to "Aryan superiority." The various politicians in Germany after the war vied to evade the truth, the unpopular truth. It could be no other way, because parliamentary politicians win through flattery of the majority, so at those times when something absolutely unflattering has to be said about the majority, only a communist dictatorship guided by scientific principles has a chance of moving forward.
Aside from MIP-Amerika, MIP-Kanada, the Ghetto Liberation Political Party, the Russian Maoist Party and the movement to put the ALKQN on the Maoist road there are no organizations in the imperialist countries with a correct line to fight the propaganda of Bu$h's "war on terror." There is no way to fight back against the propaganda without the ideology of collective responsibility. The terrorist attacks on ordinary Amerikans will appear as out-of-the-blue, unless we understand the oppressive actions of ordinary Amerikans costing millions of innocent civilian lives since World War II.
Eventually, the understanding of "collective responsibility" in Germany fell by the wayside. In the meantime, at least a partial purge of Nazis from responsible positions had occurred, a difficult struggle considering how many ordinary Germans had enthusiastically participated in Nazi oppression. In eastern Germany, various citizens of other Sovietized countries had to run the administration while Germans could not do it for themselves. At the time, there was no systematic theory for why the Germans could not do it themselves, only a political reality of Nazi history, a fact too obvious to evade, theory or no theory.
Soon after the end of World War II, Stalin died in 1953 and the political path of capitalist-roader Khruschev was clear. There was never to be a summation of the German experience guided by revolutionary science. It is only with 50 years hindsight, and the principles developed in MIM's line, that we can now say that the "collective responsibility" movement of Germany in 1945 and 1946 was the greatest political advance of the Western white man in the 20th century.
Ironically, today, Ward Churchill finds himself criticized by many consciously and unconsciously influenced by Marx writing about early capitalism. Yet it has been almost 160 years since Marx wrote the "Communist Manifesto" and over 80 years since Lenin explained why imperialist wealth may delay the revolution in the most industrialized countries. That means that we are overdue for a correct summation of history.
The award for the greatest accomplishment of the Western white can not go to the rebels of Paris in 1968, because there was no follow-up. The rebels had the physical opportunity to take power, but did not because of a lack of mission that the German comrades demonstrated in 1945 and 1946. The German comrades too had many flaws, but the one thing that they managed to do is still unparalleled elsewhere--provide political meaning to a majority on why it had been wrong.
The German communist example in 1945 continues to shine a brilliant light today. The German communists were not "terrorists" or "terrorist sympathizers" for talking about "collective responsibility" and that is something that even the ordinary Amerikan can understand, if political activists unite behind the MIM line to put forward the explanation necessary. Just as today the various minorites scapegoated by the allies of the Bu$h administration had nothing to do with 911, because it was Reagan and Bu$h who armed and trained Al-Qaeda, so too the German comrades were involved with no terrorist armed actions while putting forward the "collective responsibility" line that advanced global peace. Certainly the ordinary Germans did suffer during and after World War II, but the German comrades held firm and did not try to evade their own responsibility for their own plight.
The German communist example also lights the path, because it proves that in any strategic situation no matter how dire, what matters is the overall strength of the international proletariat in the world, not inside a particular powerful imperialist country. There is no reason to give up the fight, and in some circumstances it is absolutely necessary to resist the majority bitterly.
Note:
Weitz, Eric D. Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to
Socialist State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 319.