A recently-surfaced anti-Bundeswehr poster showing three German soldiers standing next to the flag-draped coffin of a comrade killed in a 2002 helicopter crash in Afghanistan has caused considerable political uproar in Germany. The cynical poster–first published about five years ago by the Berlin branch of the ultra-left wing pacifist “Bureau for Anti-Military Measures”–hails the death of the German soldier as a “Step Towards Disarmament”. The caption reads “We greet this concrete measure to reduce the size of the military one-by-one.” In an interview with Germany’s mass daily Bild, conservative defense minister Franz-Josef Jung condemned the poster as “tasteless” and “irresponsible”. Belatedly, the parent organization of the “Bureau for Anti-Military Measures” has now also come out with a lame statement describing the poster as an “inappropriate form of addressing the issue of Germany’s involvement in war.” Despite the strong political backlash, the Bureau’s website is still featuring the poster prominently on its website.
