Bahamas (magazine)

Bahamas is a German political magazine with a leading role in the Anti-Germans movement. Bahamas is published in Berlin with two or three issues per annum.

Background

Bahamas was founded in 1992 in Hamburg by the minority fraction of the dissolved Communist League (KB), named "group K". It emerged from the 1990s dispute within the KB about the position on the emerging unification of Germany. While KB's majority current merged with the Eastern German Communist Party renamed Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), focussing on social opposition to the consequences of the expected restoration of capitalism, the KB minority expected a renewed German nationalism, the resurgence of racism, anti-Semitism and historical revisionism and new German power ambitions and therefore focussed on radically opposing the German unification.

Their pessimistic outlook led them to ironically suggesting "to emigrate to the Bahamas", in an argument to Knut Mellenthin, a prominent spokesman for the majority. "Bahamas" became the name of their main publication organ.

Name

At that time, the most prominent member was journalist Jürgen Elsässer, who is also regarded as author of the neologism "anti-Germans".[1]

History

In the first years, Bahamas presented a pluralistic debate organ of forces of the radical left from different backgrounds with a common focus on opposition to nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism and to trivialize it in parts of the traditional left is. Gradually, however, forces gained the upper hand, the se oriented to the positions of Freiburg Initiative Socialist forum - relying on critical theory, especially Theodor W. Adorno - a further distancing from traditional positions of the Left completed and is now engaged in anti-Semitism focus. Most of the former KB members left then the editors.[2]

For binding for the magazine theoretical core, the view was raised that criticism of capitalism only "emancipatory" is if it is based on a theoretical insight into the "fetishism" of the capitalist relations of production and if the progressive achievements of liberal bourgeois society, namely the emancipation of the individual from primitive life forms and collectives, affirmed and carried further. Fetishized critique of capitalism, which in the sphere of circulation (questions of distributive justice, moral protest against exploitative behavior, the pursuit of values of solidarity within communities) attaches, on the other hand attacked for "racial" and "anti-Semitic." Germany is the epitome of the "nationalist" principle (citizenship on the basis of descent). As a positive counter-model functioned in Bahamas' first republican France than on civil rights rather founded on a community of descent nation. Above all, the unconditional solidarity with Israel was raised to the highest principle.

The intensification of the conflict in the Middle East led to Bahamas' editorial increasingly representing Islamists as "jihadist" enemies of modern civilization and the parallels of Islamic thought as structures and organizations for fascism and Nazism. Resulting eventually in an open espousal of the US and its war on terror.[3]

References

  1. ↑ Gerhard Hanloser (editor): Sie warn die Antideutschesten der deutsche Linken : zu Geschichte, Kritik und Zukunft antideutscher Politik. Unrast-Verlag. Münster 2004. p. 22-31
  2. ↑ http://www.isf-freiburg.org/isf/beitraege/isf-prodeutsche.html
  3. ↑ http://www.redaktion-bahamas.org/aktuell/terror.html

External links

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