"When dealing with the foreigners ...we should make it our business to recognise and foster as many ethnic minorities as possible...! mean that not only do we have the greatest interest in not unifying the peoples of the East, but also, on the contrary, in dividing them into as many parts and splinters as possible."
This is how Hitler's SS chief Heinrich Himmler summarised the principles of Nazi Germany's "New Order in the East".

Don't you often get the feeling that what has been going on over the last two or three years is reminiscent of this Nazi quotation?
Doesn't one sometimes get the impression that Germany is retracing the footsteps of its historical forebears and has the same objectives, even if the means are different?
Doesn't the slogan "Self-determination for nations" suggest a continuation of German foreign policy from Stresemann in the Weimar Republic via the Nazi Ribbentrop to Genscher and present foreign minister Klaus Kinkel?

There's more hidden behind this slogan than the normal capitalist interest in market-economy; there's also an interest in defeating and dominating other states.

Take the example of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic: after the "velvet revolution" of 1989, it appeared that Czechoslovakia, of all the Eastern Bloc countries, had the best prospects for rapid European Union (EU) membership. Yet the Federal Republic of Germany and, in particular, the Bavarian State Government allied themselves early-on with the Slovak separatists. The Hanns-Seidl-Foundation, closely allied to the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), supported the rise of the Slovak President Meciar financially and contributed "substantially" towards his election victory.

"Substantially contributed": this description doesn't come from a leftist propaganda sheet, or from Rude Pravo, but from a leading magazine of the German business community - Wirtschaftswoche - in fact.

Out from the chamber-of-horrors of world history, with Bavarian and German assistance, comes Slovakia. Meciar and his followers justified the break-up of Czechoslovakia with the assertion that the "Slovak people" had always been oppressed by "Czechoslovakism".

So what is the "Slovak people" then? In the hunt for this chimera, the nationalists repeatedly succeeded only in re-exposing the resounding defeat of that previous will-o-the-wisp, the Slovak State, which existed only once, from 1939 until the end of World War II, as a fascist state allied to Hitler's Germany.

Without a second thought, the "new" Slovakia took on the coat of arms of its historical predecessor and members of the governing party are pressing for the rehabilitation of the wartime clerical-fascist dictator Josef Tiso.

The truth about the first Slovak state, which is so unpopular in the second, looks like this: after the annexation of the Sudetenland in October 1938, Hitler prepared the defeat of "left-over Czechoslovakia" ("Rest-Tschechei") and encouraged the formation of an "autonomous" Slovak government in Bratislava.

In March 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Prague and proclaimed the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". At the same time, Slovakia declared itself an independent state. In truth, it was nothing more than a "satellite par excellence", according to Raul Hilberg, the historian of the Holocaust.

Only ten days after independence, the first concentration camp was opened at Ilava; in March 1942, the round-ups and deportations of the Jews to extermination camps began. Of the 88,000 Slovak Jews, 70,000 were transported. 65,000 never returned.

For this crime, Tiso, the President of the Nazi puppet-state, was hanged. This was still under the democratic President Benesch, that is, before the Stalinist takeover of the country.

Where the past is so uncritically adopted as legitimisation of the present, it's small wonder that its renaissance is being undertaken. The human rights situation in the new Slovakia has worsened: The largest minority, the 600,000 people of Hungarian origin, have been shoved step by step into obscurity by a language-ban, while open-season has been declared on Roma people by the President His Excellency himself.

He recently declared the Roma to be a "retarded population group" while the uncertain future for Jews is illustrated by the fate of Fedor Gal. He survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp as a baby, hidden in a shoe-box. In 1989, he took a prominent part in the "velvet revolution". Yet after the political changes, he found himself ostracised by threats and intimidation. His involvement in the democracy movement had not helped. By 1991, he was forced to emigrate from Bratislava.

The sole "minority" to prosper from the independence of Slovakia, are the 5,000 "cavemen", the so-called Carpathian Germans who are cared-for and pampered by the Meciar government. And, so we are back to the promotion of German interests.

The bogus slogan of "self-determination for nations" permits Germany not only to stick its nose into other states' affairs, but to consider direct annexation, since, if all other nations have a right to self-determination, who should deny that right to the German nation?

This is the secret behind the instant German recognition of Slovakia.

Now I'll quote Wirtschaftswoche in full: The CSU was active "...in order to strengthen the position and the claims of the Sudeten Germans vis-a-vis Prague. They have played a vital role in Bavaria since 1945, as some of the most faithful CSU voters".

The following examples give further credence to the theory. After a meeting with the Bavarian prime minister Streibl, Meciar announced that the German- Czechoslovak friendship treaty would be annulled and a new agreement signed, which took better account of the claims of the Sudeten Germans.

Anyway, the CSU signalled, with the naming of the Speaker of the Sudeten-German-Landsmannschaft Franz Neubauer, as Head of the semi-State-controlled Bayerischen Landesbank, that it would use the end of the Czechoslovak Republic as the green light for a new revanchist onslaught, and for maximising the opportunity for economic subversion.

Neubauer's Landsmannschaft announced that following the "end of the inhumanity of Czechoslovakianism" it would ensure that the financial strength of the bank, one of the foremost new financial institutions in Prague, was put behind its unmistakable demands for the right to self determination for the Sudeten Germans.

What is meant by "unmistakable demands" is, first and foremost, the undermining of the German/Czechoslovak Treaty. The Treaty, ratified in 1992, noticeably offers two clauses open for "improvement".

• Firstly, it leaves open the question of financial compensation for displaced "Volksdeutsche" (ethnic Germans who moved en masse from their Sudetenland homes in 1945/46) - compensation for Czechoslovak citizens who, were murdered by the Germans in Lidice and other places, or had their possessions "aryanised" was never even discussed.
  The Bavarian State Government is applying enormous international pressure in this direction, by, amongst other things, having a report prepared which not only cites the "expulsion" as a whole, but also - a record achievement in demagogy - the dispossession which followed, as "genocide". The sum demanded by the Sudeten Germans is approaching 130 billion DM - which if paid would bankrupt the Czech Republic.
• The second weak point of the German/CzechoslovakTreaty is that it rules out an annexation of the "Sudeten territory" by Germany, but leaves open the possibility of the "Sudeten Germans" themselves opting for joining the new Germany. It thereby invites nothing less than a rerun of the historic events of 1936-1938. This of course is not openly stated, but hedged around. Because the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler is not declared "from the outset null and void", the revanchist interpretation is left open and the claim that territory be ceded to the Germany under the agreement would be legitimate, because it would merely be expressing the "right to self-determination" of the Sudeten-Germans.

Renewed resort to the "Munich Method" in the post-war period foundered until now on the fact that though the Landsmannschaften were able to shout their mouths off in Bavaria, there was no "German minority" in the CSSR/CSFR (Czech Socialist Republic / Czech Federal Republic) to make similar demands.

The "Confederation of German Cultural Associations", which was founded in Prague in 1969, pursued a docile traditional folkloric policy, through a mixture of Friedrich Schiller's poetry and Egerland march music. From a Sudeten-German point of view, the organisation had the unforgivable shortcoming that it was loyal to Czechoslovakia.

Consequently, for the last few years there have been repeated attempts to destroy the organisation. With the collapse of the CSFR, however, the breakthrough may now have been made. On the initiative of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, within the space of a few weeks in the autumn of 1992, a Landsmannschaft for Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia was cobbled together. This splinter group has in most villages, it's true, only just about one tenth of the 7,000 members of the established association, but it has far bigger financial resources.

All over the place, propaganda centres, euphemistically called "social centres", with a lavish infrastructure, are springing up. The high-point was the recruitment of the former chairman of the old "Cultural Association", who on double his original retainer, is in now charge of one of these centres. Two German-language newspapers in Prague and a radio station in "Egerland" are drumming-up support for the new association, which presents itself as the domestic and foreign policy human-rights body of the future.

There will even to be participation in the next elections. In November 1993, the Demokratische Partei Sudetenland was founded in Pilsen. It calls itself for short the SDP, just like its historical predecessor, the Sudetendeutsche Partei of Hitler's governor and stooge, Konrad Henlein.

Landsmannschaft leader Neubauer has already boasted: "I have fought twenty election campaigns in Germany, why shouldn't I fight the twenty-first in Czechoslovakia?"

That such revanchist events in Czechoslovakia are not just isolated incidents, and that in other places things look even worse, can be evidenced by this quotation from the February 1992 edition of the business newspaper Forbes: "Following the completion of reunification, a second German newly-created state is intended to emerge - in the middle of Russia, 3,000 km east of Berlin: the 'Autonomous Volga Republic'. Official language? German. Two million Russian Germans ... are expected to move there. As an upwardly mobile economic elite of German stock with Prussian virtues, the Volga Germans could become the pioneering advance guard of the Kohl Empire in Russia." The article subsequently also refers to the planned newly-created state as "Volga Germania".

As has been said, these quotations don't come from some mouthpiece of the exiles, but from a well-known German business paper.

On the grounds of current internal unrest in Russia, the Germans have recently shifted their ambitions for such a "Volga Germania" to the former East Prussia, in what is at present Kaliningrad. This area, as a result of the independence of the Baltic republics, is now a Russian enclave with no hinterland and is therefore in a hopeless economic situation. Germany has promised that it will, as a Freeport and Free Trade Zone, be associated with the European Union. Enthusiastic noises are made about a future "Hong Kong on the Baltic".

In Bonn, it is insisted that the area would formally remain thoroughly Russian, but such statements merely pay lip-service to the reality: the power of economic development will soon enough pull Kaliningrad in the direction which appeals to Forbes. Groth, the leader of the Russian-Germans, has urged the Federal German government not to delay the formation of this German bridgehead any longer, or he will instruct his compatriots who have emigrated to the Federal Republic to vote for the fascist Republikaner in the Federal elections.

In other words, he threatens a repeat of the events which led to the Anschluss of the German Democratic Republic. Then, too, moderate sections of the Establishment and the business community as well, either did not want the Anschluss or wanted it at a slower pace. They were, however, thoroughly trounced by pro-Anschluss elements in the East who had been incited by the Federal Chancellor's Office and the right-wing Springer press empire.

In conclusion. Five theses:

Firstly, the "Right to self-determination of nations" is another name for the Germanisation of Europe.

The "Shared house of Europe", of which Gorbachev so naively dreamt, is being devoured by the termites of separatism. In Eastern Europe, through the parcelling-off of the great state-owned industries, these elements are easing the path for German capital, which at the beginning mobilised more investment there than all its competition put together. The most aggressive of the nationalists in some of these countries adopt similar tactics and have historic links with the Germans. In the Balkans and Eastern Europe, "nation" is always interpreted as being ethnic - the civil, democratic interpretation of the word is much weaker.

Croats, Latvians, Estonians, Slovaks, Lithuanians and Ukrainians provided auxiliary troops for the creation of an SS-Europe and thugs for the application of the Final Solution. Because, in a time of recession, all this separatism is completely without economic perspective, the new small states will soon scratch around for potential supporters. The economic strength of Germany and the ideological echo of historical partnership will form a gravitational field which will affect the new nationettes and transform Europeanisation into Germanisation.

The Maastricht Treaty, the "last project of the old era and not the first of the new" as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung terms it, no longer meets the aspirations of a united Germany. That is why the German Bundesbank has made it redundant by torpedoing the European Monetary System. The EU is thus thrown back to the position that existed at the start of the 70's and, rather than continuing to develop into the United States of Europe, it will be relegated to a German Free Trade Zone.

The EU is being moulded by a currency-block of states which are linked to, or dependent upon, the Deutsche Mark. In other words, instead of a Maastricht Europe, there will exist a Greater German Economic Empire with the exception of France, but including the pro-German non-EU countries, Sweden, Finland, Austria and Switzerland, plus one or two German vassal-states in Eastern Europe.

The reunification of Germany of 3 October 1990 was not the end. Preparations are afoot for further territorial expansion. The immediate interest is the area of Kaliningrad, but the pressures for Anschluss in Silesia, Austria and the Sudetenland will grow.

Part of the process of creating pro-German satellite states in the Balkans has been the Federal Republic's objective of heating-up the internal conflict in Yugoslavia into a war and by recognising Bosnia it has exacerbated the situation.

Further proxy wars in the interests of Germany are conceivable, in particular in the Greece-Albania-Macedonia triangle, but also between Russia and the Ukraine or in the former Soviet Turk republics, which Germany is infiltrating via its axis-partner Turkey. Even internal imperialist wars cannot be ruled out.

In other words:
Finally, the chief enemy exists in our own country.

Once again, the consumer society, having reached the end of a long crest, is unleashing the barbaric mechanisms which it was able to smother during the long postwar period of stability.

It is not a question of a North-South war - we've long had those! No, it's something rather worse: the collapse of the market economy and war between everyone and everyone else. International capital faces death by success and now, with the barely-expired Stalinist enemy and his unifying influence gone, the competing economic powers are unleashing antagonistic nationalism.

The new Germany is freeing itself from its Western ties, and reestablishing the alliances which led to 1914 and 1939.

The anti-militarist Karl Liebknecht, in a similar situation, resolved to set up an opposition movement with the slogan "The chief enemy exists in our own country". The German Left, in the period after World War II, unfortunately never followed that example. For them the chief enemy was always seen as being somewhere else. For one lot, it was the USA, for others it was both the superpowers. This belief was always false. Now, following reunification, in this bloated Germany this belief has become a fire hazard.