The Tanks of Berlin
Did We Slide into a Parallel Universe?
I have to pause Life Among the Three Dimensionals for a few days. I wrote that story more than a decade ago. I know that it's an old literary saw how the protagonists in a book take on a life of their own. But it is true. The characters speak to me. Not in a schizophrenic sense of "hearing voices," but they do speak as surely as I sometimes "hear" lost friends, dead teachers and family from ages ago. Sometimes the characters in a book rebel and demand change. Just like you and I do. Or should.
Hugo Nash and Szofia (yet to make her debut) have made it clear - they want some themes modified. The Zeitgeist and, seemingly, our entire world has changed from when they first were created, and they are demanding that I make some changes in recognition of that.
Or have Hugo and Szofia (and all of us) changed and the world has not?
There is an amusing last-century book by the Irish author Flan O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. The characters in the book get so annoyed with the badly written narrative that they sabotage the author and try to write him out of the novel. I encountered something similar in one of my own short stories, Little Annie Asteroid and The Rock Jam on Upper Utula III: one of the characters threatened to go on strike rather than speak the lines I wrote for him. I relented, of course.
Like Hugo Nash in LA3D, have we slid into a parallel, but almost unrecognizable slice of the Multiverse unrecognizably far from where we used to be? What I once thought, I now think differently. What seemed clear just ten years ago, is now murky. What I didn't see at all then, is now staring me in the face.
The tanks of Berlin.
The picture at the head of this commentary dates from 1961. It was the original "incident" at Checkpoint Charlie at the boundary between East and West Berlin. The Wall was not yet built but would be soon.
I arrived with my parents in West Berlin in December 1967. As a military brat, I attended a Defense Department operated high school along with the sons and daughters of various "State Department" and allied government officials who did Lord Only Knows What in this frontier city of the Cold War. Think John le Carré, George Smiley and all that kind of clandestine stuff.
Berlin, in the 1960s and 70s, was still an occupied city. Its four sectors were controlled by the French, the British, the United States and the Soviet Union although municipal regulations, domestic affairs and constabulary functions were governed by the eastern and western "civilian" halves of the City. The capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, aka "West Germany" (the BRD), was Bonn, not Berlin. Berlin itself was an island in the middle of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, aka "East Germany" (the DDR). The only way in and out of Berlin for Americans, at that time, was to fly (via Pan Am, BEA or Air France), to take one of three American, British or French military "duty trains" (more about that another day) or to drive a designated highway through the DDR using "flag orders" that permitted us to interact solely with Soviet border guards rather than DDR Volkspolizei ("Vopos").
At that time, the U.S. didn't recognize the legitimacy of an independent state of "East Germany." The U.S. non-recognition of an independent "East Germany," ironically, is analogous to China's non-recognition of an independent Taiwan. But somehow, Taiwan is different and East Germany was not Taiwan, and "we" are free, but "communists" are not, or whatever; but it really doesn't matter whether the narrative was illogical, so long as the people swallowed it (and we did) along with our other daily doses of blue pill narratives.
When I lived in Berlin, there was a large prison in the Spandau district that held exactly one person: Rudolf Hess. Hess was still alive and imprisoned there at the time. Hess had been Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler. In 1941, just one month before Germany launched Operation Barbarosa (the fourth of six "western" attempts to dismember Russia since the 19th Century, counting current events), Hess flew solo to England in a specially outfitted Messerschmidt Bf 110. Apparently, he intended to meet with the Duke of Hamilton who was believed to represent the "faction" in Great Britain that wanted to end hostilities between Great Britain and Germany. After bailing out mid-air, Hess was captured (apparently by a different "faction") and he never got to meet with the Duke of Hamilton. Notwithstanding the large amount of official chaff that purports authoritatively to explain this extremely odd incident, the straight story about whether Hess was trying to negotiate an English-German rapprochement, who arranged his undertaking and whether it was connected with the forthcoming German invasion of Soviet Russia has not been, and likely never will be definitively established. In any event, in and since 1941, everyone in Berlin and in London disavowed any connection to, or advance knowledge about Hess's intentions, and the whole affair was soon officially buried as just another crazy "lone wolf" acting on his own.
I have no idea what was the truth, except that the "official story" makes no sense. The "official stories" usually don't. I only mention Hess and Spandau Prison because, even unto the last decades of the 20th Century, Berlin was seething with intrigue. It was a standing Berlin joke that every fifth person was a spy or a counter-spy, an agent, a double-agent, or a double-double agent, working for one side, the other side, or all sides simultaneously.
We kids in high school knew the joke and shrugged it off as young humans are so good at doing. Life went on like in any high school (except that we were living in the middle of East Germany surrounded by Soviet troops). In our high school some studied, some goofed off; there were football teams and cheerleaders; there were cliques and clubs; there were good teachers and bad; scooter riders and motorcyclists; wanna-be rock stars; smokers and tokers; parties, dances, romance, lost souls, dreamers, thugs, jocks and "freaks" (those of us who had caught the long-haired, beaded hippie counter-culture blown across the world from London and San Francisco). The U.S. military is one of the most hierarchical institutions on earth, but in school, we students knew no caste boundaries. The flower seeds of Haight-Ashbury bloomed here, too, among the officers' and NCOs’ kids alike.
Across town, we encountered our German counterparts who attended Gymnasium, Hauptschule and Realschule, and also the older college students studying at the Freie Universität. Mostly, we rubbed shoulders at Kneipen like Annapam, at rock concerts and at the youth clubs around town.
When I lived in West Berlin, the Vietnam War was at its worst. I saw in the Berlin caserns many young GIs, most of them conscripts not much older than me, who had come back from Southeast Asia addicted to drugs, demoralized or totally brain-addled. Often all three.
The German students I knew were largely anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-racism and anti-war. I remember the attempted assassination of radical student leader, Rudi Dutschke, and the ensuing student riots against the conservative publishing house Springer Verlag, the Vietnam War and the United States. There were similar student uprisings in France around this time. We "brats" shrugged it off. It was just part of the background noise. We were largely ignorant and insouciant. Life went on like in any American high school.
At that time, we could still use dollars to buy Currywurst, Pommes Frites, a stein of beer and a bag of gebrannte Mandeln (cinnamon toasted almonds) in West Berlin. Berliners accepted dollars at a street exchange rate of 4 D-Marks to the Dollar. Not too many years later, the exchange rate was $1 = 1DM. Now the Mark is gone, replaced by the Euro. A single "Bitcoin" sells today for $52,066.99.
The tanks of Berlin.
My bedroom window overlooked ClayAllee, one of the main thoroughfares that ran from the 40th Armor Regiment depot in the American Sector toward downtown West Berlin.
Roughly once a month, there would be an "alert" and the 40th Armor would scramble. Sometimes the Soviets triggered the alert; sometimes the Americans, French or British did. During an alert, hundreds of American M60 main battle tanks would roar down Clayalle past my bedroom window, blackout convoy lights on, tracks clattering, noxious diesel exhaust clouds trailing behind them, whip antennas bent down, brigade flags flapping in the tailwind. The alerts usually occurred at night or at some gawd-awful hour of the morning. The tanks raced toward Checkpoint Charlie or some other confrontation point on the periphery of the city, as in the photo at the head of this story. There, like in the photo, they aimed their cannons at the Soviet tanks across the checkpoint that were aiming their cannons at the Americans. The next eruption of the non-stop Second Hundred Years War (the class war continuum that we have been taught to divide in three as the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War) was a hair's breadth away. This went on for hours or days, like a lethal game of chicken, "our tanks" facing off against "their tanks," until someone blinked and everyone returned to barracks.
Until the next alert.
Tanks rolled past my bedroom window every few months without exception. The first several times I witnessed this, I jumped out of bed to watch them speeding down the road. Young male teenagers in particular are fascinated by fast, powerful, noisy and very phallic looking tank guns protruding from bulbous armored turrets and I was no different. It's a testosterone kind of thing. But after several events like this, I stopped getting out of bed. And then I started to sleep right through it.
I've been sleeping through things like this for decades.
Age does funny things. Our bodies grow a little slower and our endurance decreases. But as our eyes get weaker, our insight gets sharper. I don't want to sleep through things any more.
Metaphysically speaking, age is liberating. You no longer have to be the "12th Man" - a tribalized "sports fan" cheering on "your team" - even though the players aren't local, even though you don't own any part of the team, even though you don't profit from the revenue, and even though you can't call any of the plays. If you mouthed off in high school you could have been suspended. If you resisted in college, you might not have graduated. If you pushed back against the Boss, you might not have had a job. But once you've gotten your "higher education" from one obedience school or the other, once you have neither a job nor a Boss to worry about, then there's not much at risk that death itself and the inevitable course of nature won't do to you anyway. And, perhaps, only when emancipated by age and the inevitability of death can you see things objectively.
By the time I came to Berlin, the Wall had been built. NATO claimed the Wall was intended to keep East Germans in. The Warsaw Pact claimed it was intended to keep NATO out. Our narrative versus their narrative. Our side versus their side. Go team!!
Et cetera.
In reality, we were the sons and daughters of legionnaires stationed at the outposts of the Empire. Perhaps, as we were told, our parents were stationed in Berlin to protect Germany from an invasion by the Soviet Union. But I doubt that, anymore than today we are supposedly protecting Europe from an invasion by Russia. Parents tell fairy tales to soothe their children and rulers tell fairy tales to soothe their subjects... and also to "justify" austerity measures, inflation, social hardships and the pursuit of war.
By and large, the truth was always staring us in the face even though we would not see it: we were in Berlin to help keep Germany apart. We have had similar objectives in Vietnam, China, Korea, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Syria, Palestine, everywhere in Africa, everywhere in South and Central America, Ukraine, and Taiwan, always aided by local compradors, Quislings, soldiers-of-fortune and the deliberate exacerbation of indigenous social divisions.
The essence of empire is not the spread of democracy, but its eradication, abroad and at home. Its essence is not the free market competition of ideas, but the eradication of competition in all spheres - political, military and especially economic. The essence of empire is a completely inverted narrative that projects onto others what the empire does itself.
The tanks of Berlin upheld the Order at that time. They do today, too.
But it wasn't the tanks themselves "locked and loaded" at Checkpoint Charlie that kept that world together. It was the economic churn associated with designing, building and selling the tanks. The single greatest reason why the U.S. economy hasn't (yet) completely "tanked" today is because of our continued design, manufacture and sale of even more "tanks," that is, our red-hot deficit spending on expensive, high-tech weapons of war. When the Pentagon and the chicken-hawks in the House and Senate (both Democrats and Republicans) agitate for more money to defend against an array of imaginary enemies, that money is spent on our strategic war industries. When the U.S., with the bipartisan support of "both parties," votes billions in aid to a corrupt Ukraine or a genocidal Israel, that money is ear-marked to be spent on American made munitions.
The money comes back to the U.S. and lifts our stock market. It is our "economic stimulus policy." The "gift" of billions to Ukrainian and Israeli belligerents kills the local people, but it economically benefits western, and especially the American, military hardware manufacturers. That translates into "jobs," a boost in the "Gross Domestic Product" (perhaps that is why this ostensible measure of the economy is properly defined as "gross" in the colloquial sense) and a robust, rosy economy... built on heaps of dead bodies. It's like Thomas Mann's 1924 novel der Zauberberg, "the Magic Mountain," set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland (where the World Economic Forum presently holds its annual meetings). In the TB sanitarium, everyone has rosy cheeks... caused not by good health, but by a low grade persistent fever. Despite their superficially glowing appearances, everyone in the Magic Mountain TB sanitarium is sick and dying with an intractable disease that slowly consumes them.
Does anyone still remember the "peace dividend" we were going to reap when the so-called "Cold War" supposedly ended? It has been spent. The "peace dividend," ironically, has been spent on war.
The world has changed and we've slid into a parallel slice of the Multiverse.
Or, is it more likely that we are in the same place we have been for a very long time, but we have changed?
Guernica.
The original colorless oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, hangs in the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Below, at the foot of this essay, is a "fair use" depiction of the original. It was first unveiled in 1937 in commemoration of the German indiscriminate bombing of the market town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso displayed the painting in support of the Spanish Republic. With the military assistance of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the nationalists, let by Generalisimo Francisco Franco, prevailed and established a totalitarian dictatorship. But for the ongoing Francoist terror campaign that killed hundreds of thousands, the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939. It was a dress rehearsal for the ensuing world war.
Many years later, Franco, too, sought to obtain the original Guernica painting "for Spain;" but Picasso adamantly refused until Spain had restored "public liberties and democratic institutions."
The tapestry of Guernica that hangs in the United Nations is not the original. Nelson Rockefeller sought to buy the painting from Picasso. Picasso, true to his principles, refused to sell it to Rockefeller.
In 1955, Nelson Rockefeller then commissioned a more colorful tapestry as a full size copy of the original colorless oil painting. The tapestry was made by Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach. Rockefeller placed the tapestry on loan to the United Nations.
In 2003, Colin Powell and John Negroponte famously held a press conference to agitate for war and the occupation of Iraq. The press conference took place in front of the anti-war tapestry, Guernica. To avoid the bitter irony, they covered up the anti-war tapestry with a blue curtain.
Colin Powell and John Negroponte spoke emotionally, dramatically and persuasively. And they lied.
Most high level politicians are practiced dissemblers and hypocrites. This is a trait common not only among U.S. politicians, but also German, French, British, Canadian, Israeli, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and nearly every high level European Union official. Their demonstrated ability to lie convincingly is, in large part, what qualifies them to rise to positions of power. In law, there are some issues or facts that may be considered "rebuttable presumptions." A rebuttable presumption is one where, reversing the typical burden of proof, something is presumed to be a fact unless the other side adduces convincing evidence to rebut it.
One could say that all persons who shout, scream, pound the table, or who have political temper tantrums; all politicians who try to shut down dissenting opinions; and all officials who try to side-track important issues with trivial nonsense; all of them should be subject to a rebuttable presumption that they are lying. One could go further: perhaps, based on past experience, there might be a non-rebuttable presumption that they are lying.
The basis for the Iraq War and its subsequent occupation and plundering was itself a tapestry of deliberate falsehoods, misinformation and disinformation. Of course, this was not the first time, nor the last time, that war and conquest have been justified dishonestly.
Although the blue curtain in front of the Guernica tapestry has been removed, the U.S. continues to occupy numerous military bases in Iraq. And almost everywhere else around the globe.
Whither the tanks of Berlin?
There are no more tanks in Berlin. Tanks... literally mobile mini-fortresses... are actually obsolete, just like battleships, aircraft carriers, strategic bombers and other monumentally expensive weapon systems. In the never-ending arms race, man-portable rockets, cheap drones and fast missiles have now made cumbersome and lumbering weapons of war just so many sitting ducks. But tanks, just like other technologically "advanced" weapons, are still used to project power and to coerce. Significantly, their manufacture and sale continue to churn the economy.
The tanks of Berlin and all the other weapons of war have been moved elsewhere: to the Middle East, to Asia, to Eastern Europe. They rumble on. The violence and confrontations and coercion continue.
Have we slipped into a parallel and very different slice of the Multiverse? Or is it the same old world, and we are different? The tanks of Berlin are gone. Yet they remain as a memory and a metaphor of what has... and what has not... fundamentally changed.
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