German journalist Götz Aly denounces pension system

[Hannah Bell]

n a contribution for the Berliner Zeitung two weeks ago entitled, “Children, Children!”, the German journalist and publicist Götz Aly lashed out at the pension guarantee introduced in 2009 by the former grand coalition government of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union.

Aly described the pension guarantee as a “misanthropic” and “disgraceful” measure aimed at contributing to the “politically desired redistribution of wealth from the young to the elderly”. Following a storm of protest from Berliner Zeitung readers who quite correctly interpreted Aly’s comments as an attack on the German pension system, Aly returned to the theme in his latest column for the newspaper.

Aly makes clear in his second article that his bone of contention is not merely the pension guarantee—a superficial concession designed to ensure that wage-linked pensions did not sink too drastically against a background of dramatically declining wage levels. Aly is after bigger fish: he is seeking to subvert the pension scheme as a whole. The main problem with the current German pension scheme, according to Aly in his second article, is that it has its roots in the pension system introduced in 1940 by the leading National Socialist and head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley.

Anyone shocked at Götz Aly’s attempt to justify his criticisms of the German pension system with allusions to the policies of the Nazis is no doubt unfamiliar with his work. Aly has won a dubious reputation in recent years for his rewriting of the German Nazi dictatorship—most notably his contention that the evil at the heart of National Socialism was its striving for social equality! ...Aly represents “a segment of the German left which now takes flight into an absolute rejection of the welfare state, legitimised by Aly’s association of social egalitarianism with National Socialism.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/galy-a13.shtml