BT’s “Correction”

Where German Imperialism Goes Wrong on World Peace

It seems that we stung the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT) by publishing an article written by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany scandalizing the BT’s German affiliate for propagating “anti-Communist nostalgia about the Bundeswehr [German army]” (“BT’s Anti-Soviet Embellishment of German Imperialism,” WV No. 900, 12 October). The German BT, Gruppe Spartakus, had written in Bolschewik (January 2006): “After the end of the Cold War, there was a change in the duties of the German Bundeswehr, which was supposed to function as a defensive army during the bloc confrontation.” The January 2007 Bolschewik continued in the same vein, arguing that “the army was made smaller, in order to change it from a defensive army into an offensive army of attack.”

This was indeed a scandal. From World War I through Hitler’s blitzkriegs against the Soviet Union to the heavy tank formations lined up against East Germany and the USSR during the Cold War, it is not news to students of history or pretty much anybody who reads and thinks that the German military is relentlessly aggressive in pursuit of the imperialist interests of the German bourgeoisie. As our German comrades noted, “The impulse to describe the functions of the army of German imperialism as ‘defensive’ during the ‘bloc confrontation’ with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies flows straight from the Cold War mythology that the ‘democratic’ West was threatened by ‘Soviet expansionism’.”

Caught out by our criticism, the BT issued a non-denial denial in a Web posting, “Reply to WV No. 900,” dated October 23. The BT whines that it had already supposedly “repudiated the ‘defensive army’ formulation in a posting on the German section of our website” and appends a translation of this “correction,” titled “‘Defensive Army’—A Mistaken Formulation” and dated July 14. The German BT’s “correction” simply further confirms our point. It states:

“We do not consider that West German imperialism had a purely defensive strategy exclusively concerned with territorial defense. Our misleading formulation was intended to describe how the orientation of the Bundeswehr changed after the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Warsaw Pact.”

Not “purely defensive”? Not “exclusively concerned with territorial defense”? It’s no accident that the BT’s “correction” is accompanied by an appendix attacking the International Communist League for our unconditional military defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states, including our support to the suppression of imperialist-backed, counterrevolutionary Solidarność. And it was our Soviet defensism that led the individuals who would later make up the BT, in Germany as elsewhere, to quit our party.

In addition to being caught out, again, for its Stalinophobic hostility to the Trotskyist program, the BT is no doubt reeling from our further exposure of its leader, one Bill Logan. Logan was expelled from our organization for crimes against communist morality and elementary human decency; the documentary record has been published in the ICL’s two-volume Logan Dossier. We fully intend to continue our exposure of the BT’s combination of retrograde politics and sinister pathology as an elementary act of hygiene within the workers movement.