German Political Class Gleefully Planning to Ramp Up Persecution of AfD and its Supporters, Because Hitler
Last Friday, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) declared Alternative für Deutschland to be a “confirmed Right-wing extremist” organisation. I very much fear that “the Right” is going to be the new panic apocalypse issue, now that climate has ceased to command apocalyptic fears, everyone abandoned the Covidpocalypse and nobody really believes that the Russians will invade Brandenburg and usher in the Putlerpocalypse.
The first thing that happened, after I wrote my Friday post, is that our American friends weighed in on this new round of political repression here in the best and most democratic Germany of all time. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance both denounced this attack on the AfD.
I like to think that Vance’s tweet draws on my earlier suggestion for how to address these themes in ways that will prove particularly awkward for our establishment. Perhaps the Vice President really does read Eugyppius!
That is, however, a side matter. Tireless Russia hawk, former Bundeswehr officer and present Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter lost his mind in Rubio’s replies, claiming with bizarre incoherence that Europe must now hope for a new “Churchill” to “contain” the United States:
Kiesewetter is among the most prominent CDU politicians and he appears on television all the time. Openly contemplating military confrontation with the United States is what passes for sanity in the Federal Republic these days.
Also, the 16 year-old girls who run the social media accounts for the German Foreign Office weighed in with a sanctimonious lecture for Rubio about “democracy” and “Right-wing extremism”. We Germans, you see, are uniquely justified to use authoritarian tactics against the political opposition, because Hitler.
Note the total lie that the BfV investigation behind this “extremist” upgrade was “independent”. As former BfV chiefs will confirm, our domestic spy agency is entirely subject to the direction of the Interior Ministry. Nothing it does is independent. In fact, the BfV only released its upgraded classification now at the insistence of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who wanted to take a parting shot at the AfD before leaving office tomorrow.
As I said on Friday, the 1,100-page report justifying the “extreme Right-wing” classification has been withheld from the public and from AfD officials themselves. Some people, however, have received copies of this mysterious and otherwise deeply secret document. These people are journalists like Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt at Der Spiegel, and they were presumably provided these copies by Interior Ministry staffers so they could write articles like this one, telling us all how Right-wing and extreme the AfD are.
As a direct consequence of this transparently orchestrated publicity campaign masquerading as an official “investigation”, we now have to have unceasing constant very concerned discussions across all print and video media about why the AfD is so bad and what we should do about it. Over the weekend every last paper rushed to tell us about new poll showing that 48% of Germans favour banning the party. The Süddeutsche Zeitung has a hefty piece on the front page today telling us all “What makes the AfD so dangerous”. Also today, incoming Family Minister Karin Prien (CDU) proposed stripping the AfD of public financing. The aforementioned Kiesewetter is full of ideas about how to harass Bundeswehr soldiers who support the AfD. Prominent state media journalist Georg Restle at Das Erste declared that “enemies of the constitution should not be given a stage”, openly hoping the BfV upgrade might be a way to circumvent neutrality rules and finally banish the AfD from all public broadcasting. Restle’s colleague, Anja Reschke at NDR, just wants to ban the AfD, because “it’s like in a sandbox” where “70% of the kids are playing nicely and then someone comes along and ruins it. … At some point you have to say: No, you can’t play anymore”.
The other thing our morally upright guardians of poor border security and expensive unreliable energy really want to do is deprive everybody who supports the AfD of their jobs. A crazy Korean-German lawyer named Chan-jo Jun, who for some reason is always appearing in the media to say unhinged Leftoid things, offers his thoughts on this front to Tagesspiegel.
Jun believes any civil servant who is in the AfD can be fired if he “supports party positions or has at least not sufficiently distanced himself from them”. This should affect “not only AfD members in security agencies or schools”, but literally everyone, including mere “groundskeepers” in the employ of the Government. Unfortunately, they can’t automatically fire you just for being in the AfD; they must first establish your specific political crimes. “Liking posts on social media, paying party membership fees or advertising one’s own membership” in the AfD “could… be categorised as supporting an anti-constitutional party” and therefore be grounds for termination.
Jun thinks we’ll finally be able to cleanse our public schools of AfD-affiliated teachers, and also that non-AfD teachers “will now be able to warn their pupils more clearly than before about the party and its far-Right associations”. Also civil servants who merely “endorse anti-constitutional AfD positions” can be fired, Jun says. He also thinks that the public sector can “make compliance with the free and democratic order a prerequisite for awarding… contracts”. In this way he hopes that many private companies will begin firing AfD employees to improve their eligibility for government contracts.
Oh, and of course the NGO protest machine is planning to take to the streets again, to demand that the Government initiate ban proceedings against AfD:
A network of Left-wing NGOs is planning a large-scale day of protests this coming Sunday to demand proceedings to prohibit the AfD. Among those calling for nationwide protests are the network ‘Together Against the Right’ and the campaign ‘Defend Human Dignity – Ban the AfD Now!’ More than 60 NGOs from across Germany have joined the initiative.
The protests will… urge the Bundestag, the Bundesrat and the incoming federal government to “immediately initiate proceedings to ban the AfD before the Federal Constitutional Court”. …
In a press release on the planned day of action [the groups state]: “The classification by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution must shake even the last doubters awake. For far too long, there has been waiting, hesitation and appeasement, while the hatred of the AfD has been allowed to spread and cause daily suffering for our fellow human beings.” …
They describe the AfD as an enemy: “The AfD is a threat to the lives of all people who do not fit into its worldview. It spreads ethnic-nationalist and racist ideas, mocks democracy and attacks the rule of law,” the action alliance says. Once in power, the AfD could “institutionalise its attacks on human dignity and democracy”. … The AfD thus also threatens to undermine the lessons learned from the Holocaust: “At the beginning of the Basic Law stands the unbreakable protection of human dignity – as a lesson learned from the Holocaust and National Socialism. The AfD, however, threatens human dignity and the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of all.”
Germany has become a really, really stupid country.
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Good to see mayor Boris Palmer speaking up, who was booted out of the Green Party for his ‘controversial’ conservative views; ”The influential mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, is harshly criticizing the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the powerful German domestic spy agency, after it labeled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) a confirmed “right-wing extremist” party. The former Green Party politician, who won Tübingen despite switching to run as an independent, said the secret, 1,000-page report used to justify the AfD’s designation basically just listed public incidents already known to the media. “Unless Der Spiegel is simply poorly informed, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has compiled primarily what is publicly known,” wrote Palmer. In addition, the report seems to focus on the AfD’s stance on migration, but Palmer himself says it is no surprise the AfD is critical of immigration. He noted that there are vast differences in rates of violence between different regions of the world, and also within Germany, it is clear that some groups are more prone to violence than others, including groups like Afghans and Algerians. However, he argues that this is socially and not genetically determined. ”Just being staunchly right-wing and… Read more »
Palmer is an awful guy but what he’s mentioning here is important: Faesers dictum amounts to declaring that German citizienship law during most of the existence of the FRG was “against the German constitution” despites it’s – still today – explicitly part of it and to claiming that people opposed to the Red-Green ‘improvements’ of this law since 2000 are not standing in political opposition to certain acts of various Red-Green government but are “enemies of the free and democratic basic order”. This means she’s literally trying criminalize political opposition as such. A law passed by a majority of MPs at some point in time is not supposed to be sacrosanct. People have to obey it because it’s a law. But it’s perfectly legitimate to desire to change or abolish it.
And ironically this was move for move exactly the same strategy Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party took when they were smearing, arresting, imprisoning and destroying their enemies to make Germany a permanent one party state. And that turned out really well.
When’s the next Reichstag fire I wonder..?
Hitler never referred to the social democrats other than as the jewish social democrats (die jüdische Sozialdemokratie) and he didn’t mean this as compliment.
Because Hitler – “Outlawing the Opposition…”
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/outlawing-opposition
“…Then, in June 1933, Hitler outlawed the Social Democratic Party. The German Nationalist Party, which was part of Hitler’s coalition government, dissolved after its deputies were told to resign or become the next target.“
Not the only lie. The other very big one is that Germany has suffered from right wing extremism. If they’re referring to the Nazi experience, that was left wing extremism. They were socialists.
Lefty Americans claim “the Nazis” were “right wing” because they want to label their political opponents as “Nazis”. Righty Americans claim “the Nazis” were “left wing” because they also want to label their political opponents as “Nazis”. Both lefty and righty Americans are totally ignorant about history of the world outside of the USA. Neither lefty nor righty Americans can be arsed to care about it.
This was hashed and rehashed and rerehashed here probably thousands of times already. It’s still wrong and doesn’t matter, except insofar that this neverending crapterfall tends to prevent possibly useful discusions about anything but US domestic politics.
I’m not an American and I would classify the Nazis as being on the left because they were collectivists and I associate collectivism with being left wing. I think excessive collectivism leads to unhappiness. I don’t think the terms left and right are useful now, if they ever were.
Collectivism is a nonsense term invented by ex-Russian-housewife-turned-political-philosopher-in-the-eyes-of-some Ayn Rand and it really just means
I AM friggin’ cluess about this stuff! And guess what! I do not care!
So-called German idealism, as formulated by Hegel, would be brilliantly ‘collectivist¹’ as the notion that human beings are essentially independent atoms of inert gases is an invention of 20th century liberalism. This would thus render the German empire “left-wing” and – for good measure – both the left and right factions of the revolutionary French assembly these terms originated from.
¹ as would Thucydides’ view of the role of the state or Diocletian’s absolutism in classical and Roman times.
I have not read Ayn Rand
I know what I mean by the word which is I believe the plain English meaning. The tension between the desire of the individual to do whatever they feel like doing and the damage that might do to others, and the extent to which it is necessary and desirable for the individual to curb their actions, both for the good of others and possibly also themselves. It just seems to me a fundamental matter of taste where you think the line should be drawn. It doesn’t seem complicated to me. I’ve not read Hegel or the other bloke you quote either.
Collectivism is a term invented by Ayn Rand. Specifically, for her inane claim that communism and fascism are really the same because both see the individual just as part of some larger social construct which is more important than it. But that’s not specific to either communism or fascism but really, how human society has been organized since seriously ancient times while the idea that individuals are to be valued above everything else is a much newer invention of modern liberalism. As Franz Schauwecker wrote in the foreword to Jünger’s Feuer und Blut: Non-Nationalist, that is, pacifist, liberalist, parliamentarian, progressivist, social democrat, party member, German democrat — all of these are the many facets of a single model of the word devoid of any future prospects, obsessed with such a frenetic circle dance around the individual, vain egotism and busy profiteering that spiritual centrifugal forces have long since dashed the miserable remains of any substance into a brightly polished shape and reaching further beyond, smashed them into atoms which will forever drift through the void. [This stuff is seriously difficult to translate.] This was written years before the NSDAP became a political force to reckon with and expresses the sentiment… Read more »
It’s a word in the English language with a clear meaning.
I think my previous post makes clear that I understand that it is an aspect of any society and that it exists on a spectrum.
Despite not having read Hegel, Rand and some Greek bloke whose name I can’t spell, I’m not stupid.
It’s a word which has been made up, probably based on something Russian, around the middle of the last century to serve a certain political agenda which makes no sense. I can’t change the fact that it has been made up in this particular away, regardless if you consider that annoying or not and I’ve gone to some length to explain why it doesn’t make sense.
For a final example, the classical Roman Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori — It’s sweet and honourable to die for the fatherland – has ‘collectivism’ written all over it as it’s again based on the notion that the individual is not the be-all and end-all of human existence but part of something greater which justifies the ultimate sacrifice of the death of certain individuals.
Minus an extreme form of liberalism – itself a left-wing ideology – which became sort-of popular in the 20th century, all of human history is “collectivist.” That’s probably because of the fact that we’re just mammals and sacrifcing oneself for the benefit of something else, eg, offspring, is as much part of our innate behaviour as it is for other animals.
I get all of that. I’m not stupid. It’s a word in the English language that has a clear meaning. The extent to which the collective has priority over the individual or vice versa is IMO a key issue that informs political views and choices. I think we have TOO MUCH collectivism. These are all my words, not anyone else’s. Don’t presume to know what informs my thinking.
You should give her a go ToF.
She’s much more on the money than any comment that originates in Germany.
Maybe I will one day. I have tons of inherited books to read before I buy any more.
I’ve you’re willing to pay for shipping, I’ll gladly send you all I have here for free. But IMHO, they certainly aren’t worth it.
I generally stick to fiction, which is somehow less depressing.
She was mostly a fiction writer, originally science fiction stories about male heroes escaping from dystopian ‘organized’ societies keeping them down.
Ah yes I had forgotten that
Are they not all basically political allegories though?
They can be interpreted as social commentary masking a novels. OTOH, one could as well just call them convoluted and dull.
I read Anthem which was sort of ok, although a bit simplistic. I had managed about half of The Fountainhead when simply I couldn’t stand the grandiloquence anymore and opted to put the book back in the shelf and cook some Brussel’s sprouts for dinner instead. Less earth-shattering but a lot more nutritious.
If so, she should have provided you with a counterargument you should have been able to use instead of the smear you’ve chosen to employ.
“instead of the smear you’ve chosen to employ.”
“ex-Russian-housewife-turned-political-philosopher-in-the-eyes-of-some Ayn Rand”
You poundshop intellectual muppet, RW.
That’s an accurate (as far as I know) although not exactly complimentary description of her. In contrast to this, your
You poundshop intellectual muppet, RW.
is just another attempt to substitute substance-free abuse for counterarguments to the points I raised.
Hoisted on your own petard, and it just fell to me pull the pin.
Not interested in your points.
As you’ve so far produced nothing but abuse, it’s obvious that you’re not interested in arguing about anything. That you believe to be able to hoist anyone on anything simply by content-free namecalling is, say, “an interesting delusion”.
I recommend it. Her books are brilliant.
Thanks
I suspect I would find them depressing, from what I have seen
No, not depressing. I really enjoyed The Fountainhead; I would recommend that one over others.
Thanks
In his book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg tried to realign the debate about how the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are understood and used. Goldberg’s thesis is that faith in Progress (capitalised) is definitive of the Left. His definition of the Left also includes ‘centre’ or ‘third way’ liberalism, and, controversially, fascism or national socialism. He shows that all these movements have an ideological commitment to the state as well as a common history. Goldberg also takes the story back to the 1930s where national socialism and fascism were regarded as not only benign, but were either to be emulated by progressive politicians, such as Roosevelt in his New Deal, or as successfully implementing ideas – such as eugenics – held by progressives such as Marie Stopes and others, and by Futurists such as HG Wells, in the early 20th century. In the wake of the Holocaust, German national socialism has become ossified as a unique expression of human evil. This has lead to a host of perverse equations to endure, and the taboos surrounding this have resulted in both Nazism and Fascism being misunderstood. All left-wing movements, according to Goldberg, emphasise mobilization against a common enemy. Although Hitler declared his… Read more »
Is there any connection with the EU pushing to limit cash as that would be a way of funding AfD without being traced and having your life ruined by the fascist government?
If the fascists do take the next step towards banning the party, the court case will risk exposing all their agents in the party that can run false flag ops to discredit them.
On a brighter note, Merz has failed in the first vote to be declared Der Fuhrer, oops I meant Chancellor.
You would think the Germans understand that Hitler’s National Socialist party is not right wing, as that is what Nazi is short for.
So Germany has gone from ‘these immigrants must go because of what they have done to society and we will imprison anyone who disagrees’ to ‘these immigrants must stay no matter what they do to society and we will imprison anyone who disagrees’.
Interesting times…
If the German people whether they support AfD or not allow its political exclusion it will mean Germany is no longer a democracy in any way.
I am minded yet again to congratulate my no vote in the EU referendum. Now that we have seen up close and ugly how badly the French and German masters can behave – effectively eliminating le Pen from the race in France and the current shenanigans in Germany with a view to eliminating the AfD. Well thanks but no thanks. Stick it where the sunn don’t shine.