Word: spd
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...would be ratified. Yet he and his Cabinet colleagues were stumping the countryside, pleading with the German people to abide by the Parliament's decision and accept the call to arms when it came. Crisscrossing the Chancellor's path and blackening his policies were the Social Democrats (SPD) in full cry. The Socialists' aim: to postpone German rearmament until they can talk over German reunification with the Russians...
...Communist Jacques Duclos to warn German audiences against German militarism and to promise, in the name of France, that the Paris accords would never be ratified. But though the Communists talked furiously, it was the massive Socialist campaign that was doing the most harm. In town after town, the SPD was whipping up German youths to riot against rearmament, circulating petitions and questionnaires whose loaded questions (gist: Do you want unity or do you want war?) led Konrad Adenauer to exclaim that these were the same techniques used by the Nazis and Communists...
...Socialist case against rearmament involves holding out a hope of Soviet generosity and good faith which many Socialists know to be irresponsible. But to the motley coalition of pacifists, patriots, militant trade unionists, left-wing Protestant pastors, wishful thinkers, Marxist intellectuals and East zone refugees who make up the SPD, the oversimplified cry of Einheit Deutschlands (German unity) has a ringing appeal. The Socialists' late leader, Kurt Schumacher, an embittered hulk after the Nazis endlessly roughed him up in concentration camps, left behind a sour political testament: "Never again must the Socialists be caught being less nationalistic than their...
...about Dialectics. On the surface, the SPD seems rich, powerful and united. It has a distinguished history of resistance to oppression (both Bismarck and Hitler outlawed it and jailed its leaders). In the 1953 general election, the SPD won close to 8,000,000 votes (28.8% of the total); it has 600,000 dues-paying members and the powerful support of the Trade Union Federation (membership: 6,000,000). But since Schumacher died, the SPD has been bankrupt of ideas and of the men and the drive to apply them. It opposes out of habit, for the sake of opposition...
Founded in 1869 by a Prussian (August Bebel) and a Hessian pacifist (Wilhelm Liebknecht), the SPD is still doctrinally Marxist, making much ado about dialectics, red flags and the greeting "comrade." The Socialists say they are pro-Western, but they oppose German membership in the West European Union; they are stoutly antiCommunist, yet they line up on Moscow's side in its fight against the Paris accords. At a time when West Germany, and most, though not all, of its workers are enjoying unprecedented prosperity, the SPD still tends to couch its cries for social justice in obsolete Marxist...