Since June 19th, polls have consistently placed support for the right-populist party Alternative für Deutschland at 20% or higher, making them the second most popular party in Germany – slightly ahead of Government-leading SPD, and behind the CDU/CSU. Last week, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), gave a state media interview in which he accused the party yet again of harbouring “a significant number of people… who repeatedly spread hatred and agitation against minorities”. Despite serious questions about whether Haldenwang’s repeated slander is even legal, spokesmen for all the major parties immediately declared themselves in agreement with the assessment.
It’s very important to note that Haldenwang is himself a member of the CDU. The Christian Democrats ought to be the big winners in the opposition, as Olaf Scholz’s coalition Government stumbles from one crisis to the next. Yet they’re doing no better than they were in mid-2021. Angela Merkel has done the party no favours, implicating the Christian Democrats in the catastrophic pandemic response, as well as the ongoing mass migration crisis and even the ascendancy of the Green climate programme. They’ve failed to offer any real alternative to the present government, and the AfD is reaping the gains instead.
A day after Haldenwang’s renewed warnings, the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier published an editorial in Der Spiegel, in which he condemned the AfD as directly as the dictates of etiquette permit, at one point even calling for “militant” resistance against the party:
Our constitution can tolerate the hardest and toughest disputes. It cannot, however, integrate enemies of the constitution – and we must not ignore the danger they pose. Political antagonism is one thing, constitutional hostility something else entirely.
So what is to be done? In the fight against extremism, there is a historical lesson that runs like a red thread through the earliest draft constitution set down at Herrenchiemsee – and which still applies today: A democracy must be fortified against its enemies. Never again should democratic rights of freedom be abused in order to abolish freedom and democracy. To be robust and defensible daily political life means first of all to demonstrate an openness to political debate and not to accept the trumped-up lies propagated by the enemies of freedom, whether with silence or appeasement, and thereby to encourage them. The democratic parties are required to demonstrate clear, resolute, even militant opposition…
That militant opposition is already here. On Friday night, the Augsburg AfD politician Andreas Jurca was beaten unconscious by immigrants in a targeted political attack, which left him with severe facial bruising and a broken ankle.
Hessen Antifa have also published the personal addresses of all AfD candidates for the state parliamentary elections in October. I doubt it is very easy to come by such information without help from the state.
Yesterday, SPD head Saskia Esken declared herself in favour of banning AfD, should the constitutional protectors declare the party guilty of “confirmed right-wing extremism”, something which is almost certain to happen sooner or later: “The fight against the AfD is a fight that the whole of society, all democrats, must wage together.”
There’s considerable doubt about whether a ban is feasible. Oliver Maksan, writing from the Berlin bureau of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, points out that the party falls far short of meeting the criteria, even accepting for the sake of argument all the establishment characterisations about its “anti-democratic” tendencies:
The Federal Government, Bundesrat or Bundestag would have to convince the Federal Constitutional Court that the whole party, not just individual members, has included anti-constitutional goals in its programme and pursues them in a planned, militant and effective manner. …
Even the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution… does not see the AfD as a unified bloc. Its 2022 annual report still reads that: “In view of the continuing heterogeneity of content within the party… not all party members can be regarded as supporters of extremist tendencies.”
Moreover, it is not enough to point to the widespread rejection of the EU, sympathies towards Russia or NATO scepticism within the party. One may think such attitudes are wrong, but they are not forbidden. What would have to be proven are genuine attempts to eliminate the free democratic basic order, specifically the principles of democracy, human dignity and the rule of law, in whole or in part.
I might share Maksan’s optimism if Covid hadn’t happened. Clearly, the German state will do whatever it wants and worry about how to justify it after the fact. Maksan is more convincing in his argument that the process of a formal ban would involve protracted procedures, and contribute enormously to AfD support in the meantime. It is a risk that the BfV seems to be on the verge of accepting:
“The political centre is currently melting like ice in the sun,” a high-ranking East German BfV official recently told WELT on background. In the East, he said, there are now districts where it is not merely 20 to 30% voting for the AfD, but as many as 40 or 50%.
The major parties could at any moment deprive the AfD of considerable support simply by moderating their political programme. What is most ominous about these developments is the general refusal even to consider this path. As I said in another context, democracy has become for our rulers not a political system, but a series of desired outcomes. Formally democratic processes which threaten these outcomes are now considered anti-democratic and beyond consideration. It is not the AfD or their supporters who have been radicalised; many AfD statements denounced by the media as extreme and fascistic were in fact political commonplaces two decades ago. It is rather the political establishment that has grown extreme and lost touch with vast sectors of the electorate. I fear this is a unidirectional, self-reinforcing process, and that our rulers will never find their way back.
This piece originally appeared in Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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“Extremism”—————You don’t get much more extreme than the pseudo scientific fraud of climate change used to bludgeon us all back to the stoneage. Where we will be taxed on the amount of stones we use, based on the idea we are running out of stones. The Sustainable Development people are the biggest enemy of the people and freedom since the forties. Notice how they never want you to have a choice because you might not choose them and their pseudo science fraud. So they try to ban you.
All true, but it is not merely a matter of the climate. The same coercive bigotry is applied to almost every issue, now – migration, identity, freedom, industry, economics, policing – you name it, it is wilfully skewed to the left. The soft tendrils of totalitarian infiltration are hardening, now, into a rooted cage. That we are on the verge of banning political parties because they too successfully challenge received opinion is more than a smoking gun or a chirruping canary. It is the full alarm bell. Let us, for heaven’s sake, wake up in time.
I don’t even know if it is the left, as such. Corbyn/Momentum was stopped by TPTB well. It’s more the technocratic order doggedly determined to consolidate their gains and take ever more territory.
Oh, it’s the left all right – not necessarily of Corbyn’s Stalinist descent and seventies vintage, but left all the same. Moreover, the MSM only took against the old creep at the start of the 2017 election, before May fluffed it with her pathetic own goal over funding care. As she started to tank in the polls the journos began buffing up Corbyn’s obelisk like charladies on speed.
And in 2019 they were right behind him.
Some say that “woke” isn’t Marxist at all, foolishly touting the line that “real” Marxists have a manly interest in reality. No, they don’t. Marx himself was always a Hegelian mystic with maximal disdain for the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.
Others insist on calling “woke” “liberal”. Again, they are wrong. There is nothing remotely “liberal” about a pseudo-religious movement which shuts down free speech.
Let’s first get it right: we are faced by fourth phase communist scum and they need to be sandblasted out of office and perhaps prosecuted for conspiracy with foreign powers against their own country.
Yes it is..
James Lindsay neatly summarises the cultural Marxism we’re up against in this EU speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA
Absolutely Rumpo.. spot on descriptive post..
Yep, you are correct about all of those things. I just happened to pick one issue in particular (climate) to highlight the tyranny that is everywhere today. It can be summed up as “intolerance in the name of tolerance” where there is this attempt to herd us all into a Liberal Progressive enclosure where the barking sheepdogs (activists) ensure we all go through the gate.
Flint Quarrying Restriction Act 2031: “Whereas he quarrying of flint for tools is threatening the purity of rare chalk streams and hindering the rewilding programme…”
Firkin genius
Well said varmint..
In my humble opinion the increased polarisation in society is due to the stifling of debate. Only one narrative is allowed regarding Covid, climate, gender, race, which means that a significant proportion of the demos feels unheard and disenfranchised.
Debate of all views might lead to a consensus view, which may ultimately lead to the best outcome.
How do we achieve this?
A major culture shift is needed in the political, scientific and MSM sphere. And that will be a tall ask.
In the meantime we can only chip away…
“A major culture shift is needed”. Yes, the reintroduction of public hanging for the political, scientific and MSM criminals.
I’ll happily tie the nooses….
Me first…with the tying…
What a brilliant idea.. I’ll bring the popcorn.. ‘-)
Although I agree I think that in this current climate, and after all of this time has elapsed since the start of the scamdemic and the associated government abuses of citizens, I see no excuse for people to not scratch the surface and look beyond the official narrative relating to anything. We have more alternative platforms and sources to MSM than ever before and if people still wish to get all of their information via the BBC or The Guardian then they’re just willfully ignorant and we can’t help them.
There really is no reason to use this ”stifling of debate” as a one size fits all excuse for people falling for the current PsyOp or government narrative BS any longer. If it’s people’s preference to remain sleepwalking through life ( and into tyranny ) and hating on anyone who is seen as a threat because we might actually wake the zombies from their slumber with our relentless sharing of contradictory evidence/info, than they really are beyond help in all honesty. It seems to me that we really are a world divided and it’s now us vs them, the blue-pilled vs the red-pilled. Some people don’t want to see because that would involve change, plus admitting they were wrong is beyond the scope of many hardcore acolytes. Their synapses would short-circuit and their heads would implode! lol
“It seems to me that we really are a world divided and it’s now us vs them, the blue-pilled vs the red-pilled. Some people don’t want to see because that would involve change, plus admitting they were wrong is beyond the scope of many hardcore acolytes. Their synapses would short-circuit and their heads would implode! lol”
This is the reality Mogs and I find it increasingly difficult to cope with. I will not give in but the head in sand adopted by my contemporaries is extremely depressing and I don’t mind admitting as much. It utterly pisses me off.
The very mention of banning the afd has just given them another 20% more voters!
Keep it up lefty dictators!
If I was a German I’d be one of em too..
The AfD is also very much into celebrating the Russians for liberating us (the Germans) from the evil Nazis. They don’t care so much about the millions of German civilians in eastern Middle Europe who were liberated from their ancestral homes and most of their property and often, their health and lives as well, through the liberal use Stalin made of his soldiers who were generally at liberty to commit whatever crimes they wanted against the population of an area when it was deemed guilty of ethnical wrongness.
And Stalin can’t even claim credit for inventing this. Erecting a panslavist European empire on suitably ethnically cleansed territories was already a war goal tsarist Russia tried to accomplish with French and British help during the first world war. Only the German military victory in the east prevented this[*].
[*] Amusingly, it also helped to reestablish Poland as an independent country. The Germans were planning to create an independent Polish state from the Polish territory they had conquered from Russia after the war. This would never have happened had the first world war worked out as the Entente powers had wanted it to be.
The Boche would be better served by investigating Merkel’s alleged Stasi links.
The ‘boche’ (an amusingly old-fashioned insult) would be very well served by getting rid of all these people who keep calling him names to distract from them pulling all the money out of his pockets.
Absolutely disgusting. Yes of course anyone opposing limitless immigration, seeing the rising crime rates perpetrated by said migrants and voicing concerns for safety and the future of their country must be labeled a ”far-right Nazi”! People are pig-ignorant, delusional mouth-breathers.
”The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) should be outlawed and its leadership imprisoned in order to deprive millions of Germans of the chance to vote for the party, the founder of a German refugee rescue organization has claimed.
Axel Steier, the founder of the sea rescue Mission Lifeline NGO, made the disturbing remarks in a social media post on Thursday. He proposed that such a drastic measure was necessary for the sake of humanity.
“In the country of the perpetrators, it should not be taboo to ban the AfD and imprison the leadership, even if this deprives 20-40 percent of German voters of their opinion,” Steier posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The persecution of Nazis is still a service to all of humanity,” he added.
His remarks come just days after the far-left Antifa activist group posted the personal addresses of dozens of AfD candidates vying for election in the German state of Hesse. The self-proclaimed anti-fascists were accused of inciting violence against public figures.
“Together with you, we want to challenge them for the spaces in which they move as a matter of course, feel unmolested, and think they are safe,” the group said in a statement following the launch of a website dedicated to targeting AfD politicians.”
https://rmx.news/germany/pro-refugee-ngo-founder-calls-for-afd-to-be-banned-and-its-leaders-jailed/
Programmatically, the AfD is identical to the pre-Merkel CDU. As recently as during Schröder’s chancellorship, the CDU employed the slogan
Kinder statt Inder!
[Children instead of Indians, ie, support families with children more to increase the number of childbirths instead of patching the holes the aging population leaves with immigrants from all of over the globe.]
in response to Schröder’s plan for fast-track work visas for Indians to fill vacant positions in the German software and IT industry cheaply, ie, without training anyone first. That’s obviously fascist beyond the pale, ie, something the US democrats and their global band of lickspittles would never agree too. White people must to procreate! This causes climate change!
Apart from that, Fear not, Eugyppius!, this story has already happened twice, first with the Greens and then, with the SED (former GDR state party, currently known as The Left): The older parties aren’t exactly keen on competitors for the very lucrative small-work jobs they like to keep to themselves. The AfD is currently – and regardless of whatever public support it may command – still frozen out of most of these because all other parties always form coalitions with the intent of keeping them frozen out. But sooner or later, forming a coalition with the AfD in order to freeze someone else out of government jobs will prove too tempting. Then, they’ll just become another party no one can distinguish from any of the others.
It doesn’t really matter who’s the public face of us being taken for a ride, anyway.
Wahlen ändern nichts. Sonst wären sie verboten.
[Elections never change anything. Otherwise, they’d be illegal.]
^^
White people must not procreate!
Banning a political party in Germany
Banning all free speech in Ireland
Closing farms in Netherlands . . .
Criminalising your main political threat in the USA
Mutilation of schoolchildren in Britain
A different turn of the screw in each country …
The SPD is always keen on banning all competitors for government jobs. In reality, they haven’t even – despite trying several times – managed to get the NPD banned. Any talk about banning the AfD is preaching to the choir in the hope to shore up the all party front keeping the AfD out (of the positions where real money is to be had) for somewhat longer.
Bizarre. Reading AfD´s policies, they seem to be what the UK Conservative Party once was. The most salient feature of AfD´s policies is how moderate they are . . .
Doesn’t really matter. This is about money and power, not about policies and nowadays, everybody who opposes goverment is called a Nazi by those in government. In it’s mostly rounded form – already a reality in the USA and rapidly being introduced globally – the parties opposing government call the government Nazis as they’re also not really interested in anything but money and power.
In the 1960’s , Germany was an example to all of Europe and became a Technology and Engineering powerhouse . That is now seriously threatened by boneheaded Energy Decisions brought down by Merkel and continued under Scholz . The other issue is the massive presence of Muslim immigrants who , even amongst the Turkish inflow from the 1970’s , have difficulty integrating . This problem has invigorated the AFD for obvious reasons . That a mainstream politician should now suggest and receive support for the banning of this party sounds like history repeating and is the very reason that Churchill created the ECHR in order to prevent such stupidity . However , in supporting the ECHR as a bastion against State Criminality , I am quite comfortable that Britain should remove itself from this institution , which is used against our interests , because we were shown twice to be bearers of the Moral standards for Europe .
Germany is being destroyed from within.. just like every other western country. Gramsci’s long march through the institutions is nearly over..
This horrific news from France is currently doing the rounds, which made me sick to the stomach to read, and I sincerely hope this poor woman makes a full recovery. As if the details of the attack weren’t bad enough now we have a French politician attempting to do a ‘damage limitation’ job due to the fact the perpetrator was an immigrant, therefore bad for the narrative. Apparently the ethnicity of the attacker must be kept hush-hush by the press whenever possible and the increasing regularity of sex crimes over the years in Europe must never be referred to, but the data is out there for all to see. I think it’s just Denmark that actually keeps a record of the ethnicity of criminals, but elsewhere, once they have their citizenship secured they will be reported as ”British, French, German” etc, you name it. You will definitely not hear ”Syrian/N. African/Turkish/Moroccan” etc, so the public are kept in the dark at all costs about just how much of a real threat welcoming boat-load after boat-load of young men into European countries actually poses. People’s concerns are therefore extremely valid. And although this incident is extreme it is by no means an isolated incident when it comes to violence against women.
”The left dares to say anything, even in tragic moments. While the rape of a young woman stirred many French people and almost the entire media landscape, Olivier Faure sent out a questionable tweet. “A criminal must be condemned for his crimes, whether his name is Oumar, Francis, Michel, Emile, Guy or Patrice. Barbarism, perversion and vice have no skin color or nationality,” he wrote on his Twitter account. “Using a heinous act to imply that immigrants are rapists is racist.”
Several Internet users have denounced the fact that the first secretary of the Socialist Party preferred to point the finger at supposed racism rather than having a word for the victim. “Not having a word for the victim who is fighting for her life. but rushing to speak out against the possible stigmatization of the perpetrator. This is pathetic,” exclaims essayist Amine El Khatmi on Twitter. For her part, the RN deputy for Var Laure Lavalette denounces: “Not a word for the victims before your immigrationist logorrhea? At least try to pretend, right?”
On August 4, an 18-year-old man broke into the home of a 19-year-old woman living in downtown Cherbourg. The assailant allegedly punched her several times in the face and body, before raping her using a broomstick. As Le Figaro reveals, the woman was hospitalized, operated on urgently and placed in an induced coma given the extent of her injuries: “perforation of the colon, small intestine, peritoneum and diaphragm, pneumothorax, rib fractures and a high risk of septic shock.” The individual was placed in pre-trial detention and indicted on Saturday August 12 for “rape accompanied by acts of barbarism.”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/08/france-socialist-leader-seizes-opportunity-of-barbaric-rape-to-warn-against-stigmatizing-muslim-migrants
I’m relieved to find that someone else has noted this appalling story. It has, of course, fallen on deaf ears elsewhere. Steyn, who might well have taken it up, is poorly and nobody else has raised a squeak.
As for the left’s disingenuous concern for “stigmatising” this or that group, they show no such anxiety when it comes to categories of which they themselves disapprove.
So, they might try to use this attack to stigmatise “men” or “toxic masculinity”; they will use attacks on the effeminate to stigmatise old-time Christianity (never Islam); and they will above all elevate the condition of “migrant” beyond criticism, because the real issue is not the migrant’s status; it is why let criminal baskets into the country at all? Why no checks? Why no vetting? Why no deportation or prompt deterrence?
And those are the questions which the left and our vile, totalitarian masters wish to stifle by raising the red herring of “stigma”. And like all liars, moving quite beyond logic or truth, they flourish warnings against “stigma” whilst brandishing it unremittingly at us – for example, in the NHS’s latest madness of blaming “colonialism” for the existence of two sexes!!!
The left establishment are criminal scum and deserve such a reckoning – but to whom can we turn? How long do we have to go on putting up with the filth of the earth in charge of our civilisation?
Superb.
Oh my God!
The Western political class have programmable ROM chips for brains. They receive a couple of signals from the mothership and it redefines the boundaries of their thinking, forming an impenetrable barrier to logic and reason, and allowing them to imperiously handwave away any challenge to their officially approved, simplistic worldview.
In the case of the UK, settled legal migrants have had a tougher time than many (though not all). Having come to the country with very little, it’s taken generations for many to gain a foothold on the economic ladder, and it’s plain to see they are the group who comprise the vast majority of lower paid, manual jobs.
As a result of this, they’re the group who suffer most from wage pressure from unrestrained illegal immigration, along with pressure on housing availability and rent prices, lack of job availability, strain on local services from the uncounted influx in underfunded areas and so on. The same is true of legal migrants who have trained, struggled for and gained hard-won visas, filling vacant positions in the understaffed healthcare and service industries.
This has always been the case. Even where minority groups have benefitted from social mobility, despite the appropriation of their existence and identity by the left, many are often fiercely anti immigration, because they are among the people hit hardest by it.
Just speak to many in the British Sikh or Hindu communities in Leicester if you ever need confirmation of this. But opposition to unrestrained illegal immigration is racist apparently, so they’re obviously inveterate racists.
They’re being gaslit by the establishment just like everybody else. Say a word against their childish, half baked utopian idealist Agenda 2030 schemes and you’re ‘far right’, ‘racist’, a ‘denier’ or worse. Any person or group who launches a coherent criticism is smeared by the thinnest sort of association with the most extreme, unhinged interpretation of their position possible.
The coming authoritarian anti-private transport schemes are another case in point. I attended an Oxford anti-ULEZ meeting before the issue had gained much traction, and was one of the few white faces there. The rest of the 40 or so attendees were from minority communities, and in despair about how their lives and businesses were set to be ruined; how any objection to the council was being met with “you’ll just have to make other plans”, behind a barely perceptible smirk.
These groups, like their fellow productive British citizens will be silenced in more insidious ways by people from inside and outside their communities who cynically claim to represent them, but the result will be the same – growing rage about slipping living standards and a feeling of impotence in the face of overwhelming official idiocy. If nothing changes, just like in Germany, there will be a war, but it won’t be the leftist wet-dream of ‘far right vs the innocent little coloured people’, it will be the working British population against the parasitic, Lilliputian metropolitan elite, and it’ll be vicious.
Faultless.