by PETER SCHWARZ
In a long interview that appeared May 20 in the feuilleton of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Humboldt University Professor Jörg Baberowski explains his far-right agenda.
The interview makes clear why Baberowski insists on his statement that “Hitler was not vicious,” which he first made three years ago in Der Spiegel and repeated recently in the journal Forschung und Lehre (Research & Teaching). His aim is to break the “cultural hegemony of the left,” as he calls it, in order to build up the right. According to him, the trivialization of Nazi crimes and the advocacy of war, racism and nationalism should no longer be “morally discredited” and considered a “taboo.”
The first half of the interview consists of fierce attacks on the alleged “hegemony of the left.” “The left has struggled and imposed cultural hegemony as defined by Antonio Gramsci,” Baberowski declares, and then complains of the absence of conservatives such as Franz Josef Strauss (a Bavarian reactionary), who “proudly said he was a conservative and a right-winger.”
“Who dares to say today he is a right-winger?” Baberowski asks. “A right-winger, well, that’s someone like a pedophile or a child molester.” The concept “serves primarily as a verbal means of defamation, in order to exclude those who think differently from the democratic consensus.”
This “shift of coordinates” could succeed only “because the left has gained the upper hand in public discourse and is the only force to determine who is left and who is right.” Both liberals and conservatives “were subject to these rules.”
In “civil institutions, in the media, education, the universities,” the “cultural hegemony of the left is structurally secured in such a way that resistance is futile,” the professor continues.
“Particularly in the bourgeois milieu, most people speak the same standardized language and strive not to violate the requirements of the diktat of the virtuous… And when finally everyone speaks the same language, then thinking is subjected to Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity).”
The “world of business” has also “adapted itself to the hegemonic discourse in a way inconceivable some decades ago.” Economic liberals and leftist romantics who believe in improving the world applaud “for various reasons the opening up of borders to everyone. Some seek boundless profit, others dream of a world society.”
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