Two weeks ago, in a monumental victory for liberalism and democracy, the German Bundestag approved wide-ranging reforms to our citizenship laws. The upshot is that it is now vastly easier to obtain a German passport. You need only three to five years of legal residence and you no longer have to renounce your prior nationality. What makes these reforms so especially humanitarian and democratic is that they were passed in particular to secure more immigrant votes for Leftist parties express our gratitude for that generation of guest workers who came to Germany from Turkey beginning in the 1950s, many of whom have avoided naturalisation because they wish to retain Turkish citizenship. The Turkish Community in Germany expects 50,000 Turks to apply for citizenship this year and every year thereafter. At a minimum, therefore, German democracy can expect to increase by 50,000 democratic units annually, until all 1.5 million non-German Turks have been naturalised.
Never have we been so democratic, and never have we faced such dire anti-democratic threats. You could be forgiven for concluding that our democracy is a mysterious and mercurial god, who thrived best when we paid him the least attention, and who seems increasingly liable to withdraw his favours now that we will never leave him alone. Thus we find ourselves debating seriously whether to prohibit democratically elected parties to defend our august democracy, and our extremely democratic citizenship reforms have likewise yielded their first antidemocratic symptoms.
Highly inconvenient for our citizenship liberalisation is the fact that the vast majority of politically interested Turks living in Europe support what our democratic minders tell us is the “Right-wing populist” AK Party of the “authoritarian” Turkish president Recep Erdoğan. In the elections last May, over 65% of the German Turkish vote fell in favour of Erdoğan and his programme of “totalitarianism” and “despotism”. Our press was beside itself. “Why do Turkish voters, especially in European countries where they enjoy democracy and freedom of opinion, vote for the autocratic Erdoğan?” they asked. The earnest naïveté is so intense, I fear it will burn a hole through my computer screen.
Now that many of these Turks are suddenly eligible for German citizenship and will be voting in ever greater numbers in German elections, the feared AK Party is planning to establish an offshoot right here in the Federal Republic. It will be called the Democratic Alliance for Diversity and Awakening (DAVA), and it hopes to field candidates for the EU elections in June. In this way, Turkey may achieve proxy representation in the EU parliament, even though Turkey is not in the EU!
DAVA says it will fight to ensure that “people with foreign roots” in Europe are “granted their rights in full”. These rights naturally include “social benefits” and “a pragmatic refugee policy free of ideology”. A foreign power, in other words, hopes to found within Germany its own political operation to keep entitlements flowing to its citizens and to keep our borders open so that its influence base can expand still further. This democracy that we are building is truly an amazing thing; it reminds one of a snake so open to novel culinary experiences that it finally eats its own tail, or of a robot programmed only to unplug itself.
Naturally, our democratic priesthood are very worried about this new threat to democracy born of their own resolutely democratic commitments. They also seem a little bit puzzled. SPD chief Saskia Esken, whose party helped devise and pass the citizenship reforms that make DAVA possible, now pleads vaguely that “we will not allow the divisive tendencies of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to play a role here“. How we will not allow that, she does not say. It seems highly anti-democratic to prevent Turkish-German citizens from founding their own political parties, but maybe it would have been even more anti-democratic to retain our old rules against dual nationality. As Spinoza taught us, when faced with two anti-democratic paths, it is better to take the lesser one, even if via an eminently foreseeable chain of events that path leads to more anti-democracy in the future. Democracy is very complicated, especially if you are Saskia Esken.
Green parliamentarian Max Lucks for his part is shocked, just shocked, at these developments:
It is of course shocking that a party is emerging that questions the achievements of the European Convention on Human Rights. And this party is guilty of an outrageous double standard, because on the one hand Mr. Erdoğan’s supporters, and therefore also DAVA, are questioning the European Convention on Human Rights when it comes to political prisoners in Turkey, yet it is precisely this convention that is important, for example, to protect people of Turkish origin in Germany from racism. And there is only one party in Germany so far that has questioned the European Convention on Human Rights in this way, and that is the AfD. That is why, in my view, we are dealing with a Turkish-speaking AfD here.
So, according to Lucks, German Turks should insist on enforcing the European Convention on Civil Rights in non-European Turkey because the European Convention on Civil Rights protects them from the racism monster in Germany. It is an interesting window into the man’s psychology. Perhaps though, because Turks are not Europeans, they simply don’t identify with the European Convention on Human Rights, either in Germany or anywhere else. I know that may sound crazy, but the vast majority of the world’s population is not especially liberal. Perhaps they are happy to vote for Left-leaning parties in Germany and the social entitlements these parties promise them, but they are not so willing to support the Left in Turkey. Perhaps they think Leftism might be a bad thing for their native land. Perhaps many Turks who resettle in Germany retain their Turkishness and do not automatically become Germans upon receiving German passports. These are just crazy racist ideas, but I put them out there anyway for your consideration.
One thing is certain: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is going to be very busy in the years to come. There will be a lot of suspending democracy to do, lest democracy destroy itself.
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And the Entente thought that they had dismantled the Turkish empire in 1919.
Poor Germany. If only Britain had allowed Imperial Germany to achieve her aims in eastern Europe in 1914. Germany today would be socialist but without the stain of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust.
And the Entente thought that they had dismantled the Turkish empire in 1919.
They did, at least insofar the provinces mainly settled by Arabs were concerned. In the aftermath of the first world war, Greece made an attempt to reconquer traditionally Greek Asia Minor which ended in a military defeat while the Entente powers were watching from the sidelines. Afterwards, they engineered the first case of large-scale ethnic cleansing in modern times, driving large numbers of Greeks from their ancient homes in Anatolia and forcing equally large numbers of Turks to quite their homes in Europe in order to move to Anatolia instead.
BTW, imperial Germany never had any war aims beyond saving itself from combined French-Russian onslaught. Anything beyond that grew out of the war itself, eg, German eastward extension to lessen it’s vulnerabilty against remote-controlled famine aimed to starve the whole population (insofar possible). It’s estimated that about 700,000 Germans starved to death after hostilities had formally ceased because the remote-controlled famine was kept in place as political tool for peace negotations (among the Entente powers only, obviously, which needed time to agree on who was to get which parts of the spoils of war).
I’m questioning these achievements of the European Convention of Human Rights as well because it’s widely acknowledged that democractic countries exist (the insignificant minority of basically, all of them) where no one plans to extend the general franchise to all legally resident foreigners. I think what we’re really looking at here is a frantic attempt of the Red/Green coalition of anti-Germans to secure a second term in office by doctoring the electorate, in exact repetition of a similar and successful maneuvre of the last Red/Green coaltion of anti-Germans in office around the turn of the millenium.
Brecht being a lifelong communist, they’re obviously aware of his advice that the government ought to dissovle the population and elect a new one if the population has lost trust of the government, ie, if an incumbent government is reasonably certain of heading for a landslide defeat in an upcoming election. All true democrats agree that voters mustn’t be allowed to force democratic parties out of government in a democracy, that wouldn’t be democratic.
Democracy is very simple when you’re Saskia Esken or Max Lucks: Seize government by (cheap) false promises of everything to everyone. Once attained, plunder the people as hard as you can and employ every procedural trick at your disposal for this to continue for as long as humanly possible.
Indeed. It has worked well for the US Democrats.
And what is happening in the UK? Well, the muslims have realised that far from benefitting by handing their postal votes over to the Labour Party by the sack full they are being shafted just as badly as the indigenous population and have decided to set up their own political party and F. Labour.
Kneel can’t get his head round this treachery so democratic reforms will be essential once he reaches Downing St.
People whose everyday life is very much dominated by an alien (to us) religion and who categorically do not desire to integrate with mainstream Consume and be entertained!-society and who actually (very likely) consider a cornerstone of that, the contraceptives-fuelled merry (sex-blind) shagaround, morally deviant, have obviously no real common interests with so-called progressive political forces.
OTOH, that’s cold comfort. I still unfondly remember a drunk Turk (muslims only claim that they don’t drink) boasting in a pub in Mainz about 20 years ago how they (ie, the Turks) would now take over Germany because the post-1945 Germans who were all spineless creeps couldn’t possibly hinder them. That’s obviously true for people like Esken and Lucks but I don’t want to become a spear carrier in their rude awakening.
Here’s the Russian Reversal for the street marches recently organized by the Scholz goverment to ‘protest’ against the existence of opposition parties:
In America, you demonstrate government, in Soviet Russia, government demonstrates you.
I never cease to be amazed that left wing politiicans come up with these sweeping policies, and then have the temerity to be open-mouthed when someone decides to thoroughly take advantage of them instead of meekly playing by the rules. Do they not understand that people are cunning and duplicitous, and want to tilt the game in their favour..?
How interesting that the Turkish word “dava” means “litigation”. So it seems that, in addition to Erdogan vowing to conquer Europe with “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army”, there is now “litigation”. I think he also said something about conquering with “the wombs of our women”, perfectly realistic considering that every Muslim man is legally allowed 4 wives and unlimited concubines (“war captives”). This fact is used as an incentive for recruiting western men. No one can say Wannabe Sultan Erdo hasn’t been clear about his intentions.
I have migled with Turkmen. I will say that in terms of educaton they are possibly one of thickest groups I have ever met but they can be an asset to a country in lots of other ways.
They must be very good at cutting hair. There are three Turkish barbers even in my little two horse town.
They’re extremely talented at ensuring that surplus taxes are consumed in form of social security payments as a Turkish family is invariably composed of a lot of people eligible for them who don’t work or work only very part-time in a family business. They also like prolonged public wedding ceremonies with seriously grating
musicnoise and – in case of more important families – long caravans of cars honking their horns while blocking the streets. This is technically illegal in Germany but that’s never enforced, due to the sheer impossiblity of doing so. One would need to to airlift one car after another by helicopter in order to get rid of the blockage.