Chancellor Friedrich Merz described Israel’s war of aggression on Iran as “the dirty work Israel is doing for us all.” The phrase “dirty work” is egregiously racist, arguably towards both Iranians and Israelis. The phrase is also a troubling echo of Nazi Germany’s rhetoric and devotion to work that just needs be done, however dirty. There has been backlash against the Chancellor’s choice of words, including a lawsuit in Berlin.
Scarcely discussed is the fact that those were not Merz’s own words, but words that the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) commentator Diana Zimmerman – visibly beside herself for having received audience with the Chancellor against the backdrop of “the very very nice view of the Rocky Mountains” – literally put in Merz’s mouth:
Zimmerman: “Isn’t it very tempting [verlockend] that the Israelis are now doing the dirty work [Drecksarbeit]?”
And, of course, Merz ran with it:
Merz: “Ms. Zimmerman, I am grateful to you for the phrase ‘dirty work’. This is indeed dirty work that Israel is doing for us all.”
Zimmerman’s role in Germany’s latest episode of celebrating violence and war has been completely ignored. Criticism has been entirely focused on Merz, suggesting it is mainly to score party-political points. Merz is being criticized as a matter of form: Yes, we know it is a dirty job — it’s a nasty one! But it’s bad form to put it like that, it’s unbecoming of the chancellor, etcetera, etcetera. It is reminiscent of the American liberals criticizing Trump for saying out loud the things they all privately think and act according to.
“Exterminate all the brutes!” is the enigmatic scribbling by Kurtz, one of the central figures in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, on the last page of his report for the fictional International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Conrad’s masterpiece is the story of sailor Marlow’s journey to find and return Kurtz, a conqueror and ivory trader of almost mythical status in the Congo. Almost a century after the publication of Heart of Darkness, the Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist published his monumental study of genocide and extermination, under that very title: Exterminate All the Brutes. Heavily influenced by Conrad, one of Lindqvist’s main points is that European atrocities in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa were general knowledge at the time:
“Officially, it was, of course, denied. But man to man, everyone knew. That is why [Conrad] has no need to count up the crimes Kurtz committed. He has no need to describe them. He has no need to produce evidence. For no one doubted it.
Conrad was able to assume quite calmly that [the] readers silently knew quite enough to understand the story and in their own imaginations develop details the novel only implied. This knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite of the book.”
The same knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite of the perfectly choreographed exchange between Zimmerman and Merz. Everybody knows about the genocidal war machine called Israel and its dirty work. That is why Zimmerman uses the word as a matter of fact and Merz does not hesitate to expand on it.
The unanimous, unconditional support of the German establishment – across the spectrum and including the media – for Israel’s warmongering and genocide is hardly any surprise to anybody with their heads out of the sand. Public and diplomatic pressure has seemingly forced Germany to minimally soften the tone of its support. Nevertheless, the normalization and broadening of blatantly and aggressively racist rhetoric, including the exchange between Zimmerman and Merz, indicates Germany has no intention of loosening its grip on what it perceives a historic opportunity for taking a “new role in Europe and new responsibility in the world”. “Germany is back“, said Merz after his electoral victory. The full extent of that return and the dirty work it entails is only beginning to dawn on us all.
