Antifa Goat Dancers in the Fairy Tale of Harz: Open Letter to Mr. Bodo Ramelow, Minister President of the State of Thuringia, Germany

Mr. Bodo Ramelow
Minister President
State of Thuringia
Postfach 90 02 53
99105 Erfurt
Tel. 0049  361 37-900
email: bodo.ramelow@tsk.thueringen.de

Dear Mr. Ramelow,

As one of the participants at a cultural gathering, organized by the monthly Volk in Bewegung, and held at a fairytale place in the heart of the Harz Mountains, I need to take issue with your decision to dispatch to our venue, at midnight, September 1, 2017, a squadron of riot police. I am writing this letter to you in English, for the simple reason that I intend to inform about this police fiasco some media and government circles in the USA. Apparently, your decision to send the police to the venue was based on your presumption, or better yet on someone’s denunciation, that a dangerous group of people was allegedly preparing an armed uprising in the Harz Mountains. The decision to send the police, however, turned out to be an exercise in the grotesque, worthy of the surreal Harz fairy tale “The Sandman” by the German classic E.T.A Hoffmann.  What the police encountered there were not dangerous right-wing militia,  but basically a quasi-run-down senior citizen home containing approximately 100 guests, mostly septuagenarians and octogenarians in attendance, some in wheelchairs, some with crutches, lots of them in pajamas ( including myself). Many of the conference guests were former German expellees, 1945–50, from ex-communist Eastern Europe.  The police, however, did not find any illegal material — other than some guide dogs for the blind and handicapped, and lots and lots of goats pasturing in the nearby fields — presumably designated for future Antifa goat dancers.

I must commend the police officers on their professionalism. Their faces and gestures, after realizing where they had landed, showed a great deal of embarrassment, with their comments teeming with excuses and apologies. Surely, it must have been a great disappointment for your government not to have spotted a single skinhead, or a single Nibelungen one eyed-Hagen, or a nose-ringed Hollywood Nazi among the conference attendants. I must admit, I was embarrassed by the sincere embarrassment of the police. They let me go back to my bungalow room after 10 minutes, after having taken photos of all of us and after having examined our IDs. I fully understand why there were no media and camera people around — it would have been a huge media fiasco for the Thuringian government for having failed to spot a single Nazi in the Harz woods.

Yes, Mr. Ramelow, the whole nightly scenario reminded me of the police search of our family house back in communist Yugoslavia, back in the 1960’s and the harassment my late father, an ex-Catholic attorney had been regularly subject to by the former Yugoslav communist authorities. (In the early 1980’s he was adopted by the AI and several US senators as a prisoner of conscience).

But Mr. Ramelow, I am also aware of your leftist-antifa past too—and the past of some German leftist RAF (Red Army Faction) terrorists who had enjoyed safe haven in the 1970’s in communist Yugoslavia.  Alas, the wheels of fortune keep spinning forever, as Friedrich Schiller wrote. I saw it first hand, when after the break-up of Yugoslavia, some former communist snitches in the newly born Croatia, in 1991, either committed suicide, or were “suicided.” Well, I guess we don’t need Schiller’s Wallenstein’s periscopes to predict a very non-astral future of Germany. In a grotesque craving for a world certificate of a “nazifrei” Deutschland, Germany’s official doubling-down on the “fight against the right”, won’t help  you get the stigma of Nazism off  your own back.  This fake self-denial in the face of the looming crisis in Germany reminds me much of the late American rock singer Frank Zappa — who was very popular in Germany when we were both younger, and who aptly ridiculed in his songs the self-denying  Nazi Hurensohn who remade himself into a big time Liberal and Antifa.

I regret that you couldn’t have made it to our literature event. We had good scholarly talks; a gent spoke on the diplomacy of Russia, from Friedrich the Great to Angela. Merkel. Another gentleman spoke on China — a rising Pacific superpower.  My speech, in German, was on significant intellectual changes in the USA, the rise of Donald Trump, the Alt-Right, the American Freedom Party, and how changes in the USA will affect Germany’s day-to-day life in the very near future.  Ms. Ursula Haverbeck at the advanced age of 88  gave a 1½ hour non-stop talk, with perfect syntax and no text reading, pointing to some disparities between the famed German Criminal Code # 130 (describing penalties for “Incitement to hatred”) and the famous German GG ( Constitution) Article #5 on free speech (“There shall be no censorship.”), in the best of all the German worlds .

Last but not least, I regret that you couldn’t have come to hear my speech. I would have gladly given you a free copy of my latest book/novella Titans are in Town, with my dedication — for you only.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tom Sunic
(author, fmr US professor, fmr Croat diplomat)
Zagreb, Croatia
www.tomsunic.com
cell. 00385 91 1722 783