Katja Hoyer writing at the Spectator magazine apparently wants to have her cake and eat it to. She bemoans the mass immigration into Germany, but is also repelled at the icky nationalists that are the only ones with the spine to solve the problem.
First, Hoyer discusses the political unrest that has arisen due to liberal/leftist policies. "Germany has undergone drastic social change over the last few years with mass immigration, Covid and economic uncertainty chipping away at its fragile sense of stability and cohesion," writes, while noting that the migrants are making things worse through their Muslim conqueror behavior:
The latest incident to shock the country happened on Friday when an [anti-immigration] activist was stabbed in the face [by a Muslim terrorst] in broad daylight. Michael Stürzenberger of the anti-Islam group Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa was about to speak at the market square of the southwestern city of Mannheim when he was attacked. Bystanders and police intervened, and the knife-wielding man turned his attention on them, killing a police officer and injuring five others.
But this is just one of many similar incidents. She continues:
The sheer brutality of the attack in the middle of a German city is enough to appal people, but it follows a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent. This year, the issue caused a huge debate when the Social Democrat Matthias Ecke was attacked by four men in Dresden in early May, receiving facial injuries that required surgery. A few days later, Berlin’s Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey was injured when she was attacked from behind and hit in the head and neck with a ‘bag filled with hard contents,’ according to police.
Yet she goes on to bemoan the fact that the two political parties most responsible for this social decay--the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats--are losing ground to other parties willing to do something; such as the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which, she indicates, is the second most popular party in many surveys.
If the resistance was limited to the hoi polloi, it would not be an issue of course. But the rising disgust over the crime and poverty brought by the African and Muslim migrants appears to be leaking into the children of the elites.
Over recent months, videos have appeared of people singing Nazis slogans to the 1999 party tune L’amour Toujours by the Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino. In October last year, young people sang ‘Germany for the Germans, foreigners out’ (Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus) when the song was played at a harvest festival in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Recordings were posted on social media, and it became a trend with further cases being reported to the police across the country.
It then made the headlines when a group of revellers at an exclusive bar on the island of Sylt filmed themselves singing the ‘foreigners out’ version. One man was seen doing a Hitler salute and mimicking the dictator’s moustache with two fingers. The footage went viral, and the German press, politicians and public figures condemned the group as ‘champagne Nazis’. In another incident, students of the private school of Louisenlund in northern Germany were caught doing the same thing at a school party. Such blatant disregard for the country’s post-war taboos by members of the wealthy elite cast unsettling doubts over the idea that this only about the great unwashed.
This has panicked the Lefties which have responded in the way most comfortable to them: increasing the tyranny.
The feverish moral panic has triggered a range of knee-jerk reactions. Details of the Sylt partygoers were published online, leading to some losing their jobs and attacks on their families. Gigi D’Agostino’s song will be banned from the Oktoberfest as well as a number of similar events around the country. Prominent politicians are pushing for a ban of the entire AfD. The political violence is to be combatted with harsher punishments specifically for attacks on politicians.
But even Hoyer recognizes this will be counterproductive, writing:
This verboten culture is unlikely to do anything but provoke a backlash. L’amour Toujours has already shot up the download charts, reaching number one on iTunes last Sunday. Many voters who have turned to the AfD because they feel marginalised by the political mainstream will feel confirmed in this should the party be banned. Violent attackers, like the man who stabbed the anti-Islam activist on Friday, aren’t going to be deterred by harsher sentencing.
As the old saying goes, hard times create hard men.
Nationalism isn't a fault.
ReplyDeleteThe cosmopolitan elites believes that their power and authority spring from being part of the American hegemony and that nationalism threatens that power and authority. Plus, in the face of mass immigration and moving industries to third world countries with cheap labor, populism has become increasingly aligned with nationalism. Thus, nationalism is, in effect, another type of peasant revolt in this day and age. And peasant revolts are generally easy to put down, until some putative elites start to show up and give it direction and support. You can sort of see it with how the Tea Party Movement died on the vine because it was mostly cut off from elite support, versus how Trump (one of the elites) has done when martialing the same discontent.
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