Establishment critics branded anti-nuclear protesters as proto-Nazi collaborators

Evidence

Böhm was a neo-liberal who had written the foreword to Group Experiment, and was chairman of the board of the Institute of Social Research’s Research Foundation. He described the protests as an attempt to create panic, a one-sided attempt to collaborate with dictators and oppressors opposing the West, class rabble-rousing against the CDU, and a brutalization of political discussion and an undermining of the Basic Law', preparing the way for a new form of Nazism. These were all clichés from the arsenal of authoritarian thinking, which required, as the writer of a letter to the paper later pointed out, that we should live in a democracy as if we were under a dictatorship’. The protests, Habermas’s article countered, were directed against the statesmen ruling in our name'. Habermas defended demands for a plebiscite on the grounds that they were a reaction to the fact that the Federal Republic was not a representative democracy in the classical sense’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2345

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures Habermas’s later critique of the ‘legitimation crisis’ and his diagnosis of the Federal Republic’s plebiscitary democratic deficit — a core Frankfurt School text. — connects to: CDU-linked professor Böhm branded atomic-weapons protesters as neo-Nazis — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2345; Calling opponents racist equated them with Nazis in Soviet rhetoric; Supporters of fascist principles protest against being labeled fascist. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1484 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: the recurring conservative reflex of accusing protest of ‘returning to Nazism’ — an inversion of the left’s own charge — as a rhetorical device seen across modern moral panics about campus protest etc.

Broader Connections

• Supporters of fascist principles protest against being labeled fascist. #exemplifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1484
• Calling opponents racist equated them with Nazis in Soviet rhetoric #complicates (0.75)