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 the trivialization of those topics among the traditional far left. Gradually the authors started a tendency towards the positions of Freiburg Initiative Socialist forum - relying on critical theory, especially Theodor W. Adorno. A further distancing from traditional positions of the Left was completed and the magazine's focus today is on anti-Semitism. Most of the former KB members left the magazine.[2]

The core values of the magazine were set to the viewpoint that criticism of capitalism is only "emancipatory" 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, is affirmed and carried further. Fetishized critique of capitalism, which attacks the sphere of circulation (questions of distributive justice, moral protest against exploitative behavior, the pursuit of values of solidarity within communities), on the other hand, is criticized as "racist" and "anti-Semitic." Germany is considered the epitome of the "nationalist" principle (citizenship on the basis of descent). As a positive counter-model in Bahamas' republican France was chosen because it is based on civil rights rather founded on a community of descent nation. Above all, the unconditional solidarity with Israel was defined as 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 comparing Islamic thought structures and organizations with those of fascism and Nazism, eventually resulting in an open endorsal 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
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