This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?
It gets even stranger:
The AfD also has cultivated its own idea of the law itself. The idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law that precedes the actual law. In the words of AfD senior member Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.” This is the AfD’s most dangerous idea to date, because it can be used to bend the law, which was once set by democratically elected parliamentarians, in any direction. The true will of the people, the true party of the constitution, the true law. We cannot continue to stand by and watch this party co-opt democracy until there is nothing left of it.
The “spirit of the law” is a very old idea; it is generally raised in contrast to the “letter of the law”. The AfD did not invent this problem in legal philosophy. All laws require interpretation that accounts for their spirit and their letter, and anyway Jürgen Treutler is a minor AfD politician who does not speak for the whole party and who was not proposing a new legal approach either. He was merely trying to defend the traditional right of the strongest party – in this case, the AfD – to name the president of the Thuringian parliament.
Lautsch acknowledges that “banning a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters” presents considerable risks. Among these is that supporting such a ban looks tremendously “undemocratic” and also that “AfD supporters could become more radicalised”.
Interestingly, these fears primarily concern the sensitivities of AfD supporters. But what about the fear of millions of Germans with a history of migration who are afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter?
That’s right, it would be positively undemocratic to ignore the “fears of millions of Germans” who don’t like the AfD by not banning the party. That’s just how democracy works: whenever the right people get afraid of the right party, you have to ban it. When the wrong people get afraid of the wrong party, however, bans are absolutely not in order. I and millions of other Germans are absolutely terrified of the Greens but that doesn’t count, because the Greens are a democratic party and we’re undemocratic for being worried about them.
At this point Lautsch comes to the awkward problem of authoritarianism. She assures us that we needn’t worry too much about this. As long as authoritarian actions are decided by democratically elected bodies and approved by courts, they’re totally fine:
It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian measure, but it is an authoritarian measure of a constitutional state. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements are met. And the decision to initiate a party ban proceedings is taken democratically – in the Bundestag, in the Federal Council or by the democratically elected federal government. [boldface mine]
Upon contemplating the likely consequences of banning the AfD, Lautsch becomes positively ecstatic:
And as a weapon of the constitutional state, a party ban is extremely effective. It is not for nothing that the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate. A ban by the Federal Constitutional Court would result in the party being dissolved, its infrastructure destroyed and its assets seized. Establishing replacement organisations would also be prohibited. AfD representatives would immediately lose their mandates. Of course, this would not get rid of the AfD members. But the party would be eradicated from the public sphere – and from the political competition. In any case, the two parties that have been banned in the Federal Republic of Germany so far – the KPD [i.e., the Communist Party of Germany] and the Nazi-successor SRP [i.e., Socialist Reich Party] – dissolved into insignificance when they were banned in the 1950s.
The SRP and the KPD were banned in 1952 and 1956, within a decade of the founding of the Federal Republic, as West Germany emerged from wartime occupation and faced down the Communist threat in the East. We were still being folded into the liberal West back then, with all the awkward (and overtly illiberal) political engineering that entailed. I find it pretty shocking that Lautsch thinks these are reasonable precedents, but she runs with them, concluding that “there are democracies that manage without banning parties, but Germany is not one of them”.
Rather, it is part of the core of German self-understanding as a ‘defensive democracy’ to be able to defend itself against the enemies of democracy with the authority of the constitutional state if necessary. You can criticise this tendency to call on extra-parliamentary authorities such as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Constitutional Court, but to turn away from them at the moment of greatest threat to this democracy would be fatal.
Yes, a ban can fail. But those who are not prepared to protect democracy with all the means at the disposal of a constitutional state ultimately surrender it to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.
Germany is the only self-described “defensive democracy” in the entire liberal West. We have our ridiculous constitutional protectors and our other political enforcement mechanisms, because ours is a provisional state thrown together in haste in 1949. We were allowed democracy only within specific boundaries, to prevent the people from voting their way back into Nazism or into the Soviet bloc. That time is past. Fascism is gone and the Berlin wall came down when I was a child, but our rulers just won’t let the postwar era go away. It is always and forever 1933 or 1938 or 1952 or 1956 here in the best Germany of all time, where our rulers govern not to solve present problems, but to beat back the phantom past, and they are going to keep us mired in this dark and hopeless political timewarp until we are all ruined or they are cast out of power, or (more probably) both.
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Straight out of a 1980s cold war movie in which some Russian helping the west is arrested and eliniated on some trumped up charge.
Just a reminder that the totalitarian spirit is very present among us, and not just in the land of our “enemies”.
No comment from government. I would hope Ms Bravermann is demanding a full report. And promptly.
What a bloody disgrace. Democracy? Err, come again.
Plod – even less use than GP’s and as much a waste of taxpayer’s cash.
Mark Steyn is determined to make the Surrey Chief Constable famous.
The Surrey Chief Constable might become famous for being the first case brought against a public official under UK National Law under ECHR Article 13, which was ratified by the UK only as recently as 2022, IIRC, after lengthy objections dating back to the Blair era.
Wouldn’t you think that it would be politically astute for the Home Secretary to request a change in the Tory Party agenda to allow her to tell Surrey police what she thought. She wiould get a huge standing ovation, even from the numpties in the Tory Party.
Indeed.
However, assuming that Mrs farrow is charged, the police would issue a formal “no comment on active case” press release. Standing ovations are not law!
Plod is marginally more useful than a GP. You can usually get an immediate face-to-face appointment (even if only with a civilian clerical person) to try to report a crime. However, if the crime you are reporting is not on their politically-controlled list of “targeted crimes”, they will either refuse to record it, or will record it and immediately stamp it “No Further Action”. Furthermore, if the crime is reported as being committed by, or is subsequently found to have been committed by, a state-sector employee then you are likely to be threatened with arrest, on the basis of divulging material that was “government property”, or is subject to contempt of court (e.g. divulging what was said in a collapsed court case). Either way, the police take “no further action”. If you bring a private prosecution, the CPS will “legally adopt” the case and then immediately drop it as it would not be in the “public interest” to continue. Unless you have actually met this machinery in the UK, you may continue to believe that we all live in a wonderful benign democracy in which the police protect us from a rogue Government, or, in practice, from individual state sector employees who run amok in the delusional belief that they Eliminating Evil and Saving The Planet. However, I expect that Braverman would be evicted from Government if she tried to #DrainTheSwamp or withdraw from the ECHR, or tried merely to enforce the newly-ratified Article 13 thereof (regarding “official capacity”) and under which Farrow now appears to have a case.
Contempt of court? Oh, like those wretched
Family Courts
Incidentally, is there a potential solution to this under the current political system?
See the interview with the great Mark Steyn on GBNews.
Mrs Farrow was clearly still upset – rightly so – but she should learn to see that arrest as a badge of honour, not something to be ashamed about. I’m sure that’s the way Mark Steyn sees his suspension by Ofcom – and he hasn’t backed off a wit.
When was he suspended by OFCOM?
July, I think. Suspended pending an Ofcom investigation of ‘misleading statements’ to the effect that the Covid jab is killing and harming people. Where did he ever get that crazy idea?
There are plenty of misleading statements in medical journals
– don’t take my word for it, that’s according to the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Richard Horton:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
and according to former British Medical Journal editor, Richard Smith:
“Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proved otherwise?”
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2021/07/02/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/
The BBC’s mission is to “inform, educate and entertain”, but Mark Steyn somehow superbly manages to “inform, educate and entertain” all at the same time, consistently, every show from start to finish.
He’s a truly brilliant satirist, on a par with the great Peter Cook, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d think that about.
It’s my favourite TV programme, I don’t just mean my favourite news and current affairs programme, but my favourite of all programmes on TV.
I would be very interested to know exactly what act and section defines the alleged offence, and if it actually exists, what powers of arrest, if any, are attached to it. Why didn’t she ask? People are too compliant in the face of authority – and she gave them her passwords too? Mad.
It doesn’t look like she filmed the whole thing, which would have been a boon. In any case, looks like she could be in for a big payout. Time to get a solicitor.
The police are an absolute disgrace at the moment.
The police admitted that they only arrested her in order to be able to search her phone etc. Sounds like a case of false arrest to me.
A fishing expedition. Guilty until they are out of luck finding any damning evidence. It’s a shame they can’t do that with real criminals.
I think there is an issue concerning entering a private property without a legitimate reason.
Some people in department plod are in deep dooh dooh because of this. Certainly the Chief Constable should be emptying his desk.
This is one of the most disturbing police acts since the Covid farce.
This needs to be addressed and the policy that allowed it struck off.
Short of threatening to kill someone, no one should be abused by the police like this.
Since when has ‘insult’ been a criminal act justifying such a harsh response? Surely, to be a criminal act, it has to be applicable across the board, not just to a single anonymous person whose feelings were hurt? This is police overreach by a long, long way. They must account for it, and be accountable for it.
Presumably your question will be partially answered if she is charged. It can’t be under the Online Safety Bill 285 as that hasn’t got Royal Assent yet.
PS: mischievous thought: could Surrey Police conceivably be trolling Suella Braverman, by making high-profile outrageous arrests in order to bring down Bill 285?
Perhaps it is indeed more about intimidation than any serious prospect of charging her.
But we don’t eben know if she did even that. Did the police investigate the posting to find out if it was an offence and who posted it.
Meanwhile, at the University of the West of England, Mark Sexton and others tried to get the police to close down a child vaccination centre. They provided evidence of harms caused and about to be cause. They offered a phone call with Dr Aseem Malhotra as further evidence. They reminded the police of their oath to protect the public.
The police did nothing whatsoever! Obvious crimes being perpetrated, and they ran away. They summoned help and those serving notice to the police were told to leave the site.
The police are supporting real crimes against the population and arresting people for passing comments. How can they sleep at night?
“You do realise that exposing the illegal things your government has been doing is illegal?” [internet memes, passim]
Of course, YouTube has closed the Mark Sexton video down! So it is now on Odyssey: https://odysee.com/@mike_austin_downs:a/Mark-Sexton-Vaccine-Centre-University-Of-West-England-Bristol—Tuesday-4th-October-2022:1
And meanwhile, somebody else in the same region served by this police force could have been experiencing a house burglary, and they could have caught the perpetrators red-handed if it wasn’t for police resources (in this case their time) being squandered policing harmless internet activity!
It makes no logical sense from the perspective that considers police forces’ main objective to be tackling real crime.
It would make sense if you take the hypothesis that the objective is to systematically subdue people into submission to a grand narrative that obliterates free speech and free thought to the extent that the state owns everything about you.
After all, anything written or posted online is totally incapable of inducing any direct harm to anyone – you can simply choose to look elsewhere. Words on a screen cannot reach out and throttle you, sexually explicit images cannot rape you. Given this, the only reason for this “clampdown” on “online harms” can be to purge dissenting information from the internet.
“When we receive an allegation of a crime…’
Except burglary, auto theft, mugging (if White), damage to public property if involves picture, portrait, statue, name of colonialist, imperialist, racist with tenuous connexion with slavery, or climate protest – for example.
We see you Plod. We see what you are, and it ain’t Dixon of Dock Green.
Could this be part of the explanation?
“Kiwi Farms has been breached; assume passwords and emails have been leaked.”
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-has-been-breached-assume-passwords-and-emails-have-been-leaked/
The perception broadcast out to the public from the government is that they’re not responsible for the police behaving like this. The Tories themselves are portrayed as victims and opposed to the communist thuggery being meted out by the police.
Tories: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. The “conservatives” have been government since 2010, and the rot has accelerated unabated in complete synchronism with the rest of the globalist WEF-guided world.
Most of us will have heard Suella Bravermen talking tough at the conference, saying she’s going to crack down on police misbehaviour (as if they’ve gone rogue) but let’s see. I give it a week or two before there’s another convenient crisis to distract the media before it’s all forgotten and business as usual.
Thank goodness this was picked up on, and well done to Mark Steyn for raising the issue. One of the worst abuses of police power recently, I felt so angry. If this is still happening at the next election, the government don’t deserve to be reelect for this alone.
My car got robbed about ten years ago. Plod didn’t give a fuck. Got the crime number from the spotty retard in uniform. Insurance company paid up. Life went on. I bought a new car. Still, what a crap reflection of society in general.
I can’t get the Keystone Cops out my mind. “Evenin all”
She and her husband (pastor) are obviously Christian.
You wouldn’t see this against another ‘faith’, ever.
It is a pattern in the UK to now prosecute believing Christians (NHS, schools, gov’t). You won’t see this pattern against other ‘faiths’ or cults.
LBGTQZ++is just another intolerant fascism, with the useless Plod as their Gestapo.
How low can the UK go?
How low can the UK go? Presumably to the point when people feel they have nothing left to lose and throw their lot in with centre Right challenger parties.
We’re with you Caroline. More power to you
Shout if you need help from these idiots.