This is bad.
Eh. Germany weren’t the colossal dickheads in WWI that they were in WWII. Frankly most of Europe had a part to play in sparking the first one.
Kaiser Wilhelm was:
Expansionist and irredentist
Fervently anti-democracy
Rabidly anti-semitic
Trying to secure overseas colonies to exploit for resources
The Third Reich was the Second Reich without a noble class to fuck things up with inbreeding. It’s hardly surprising, a culture can’t change completely in the span of a couple decades.
Mom, can we get Nazis?
No we have Nazis at home.
How the hell do you think it starts‽ In the 20s with complete idiot nazis
That last time it started by Germany losing WW1 badly and getting a bit of shit handed to them. I don’t think anything comparable is happening right now. Germany is a stable liberal democracy with stable instutitions.
Our “Verfassungsschutz”: “Watch out! They plan to overthrow the current system!!”
AfD voter: “Yeah, but the migrants”
I’d go even further. The AfD threatens the current (democratic) system. Most AfD voters vote for them for this exact reason. They want to “enact revenge” on a system they feel left behind by IMO.
“democracy doesn’t let me be racist enough, we should get rid of it”
~average AfD voter
Who should I vote for after unhinged leoliberal capitalism made my life worse?
- Socialists: Vote for me, so I can tax the rich and spend money on programs to help workers like you
- Fascist: Vote for me, I promise to deport some brown people (but in reality I will just cut the taxes of rich people and be friendly with Russia)
Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.
However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.
- The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
- Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
- The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
- Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).
Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.
Plenty would gladly vote socialist, this is the east we’re talking about, you can see that by the stellar rise of the BSW: 15% in both Thuringia and Saxony, in their first elections. That’s actually unprecedented in Germany I think. Why not Die Linke? Less infected by the New Labour bug than the SPD, still awful though barely managing to be SocDems as opposed to DemSocs. 150% fed up with liberals, have a look at the complete collapse of FDP and Greens. Something something making everyone install heat pumps instead of giving municipalities money to invest in district heating which would even have been cheaper overall.
Put bluntly, from a west German perspective, the issue in Thuringia is that people by and large think you can change shit by whining, complaining, and being nasty to politicians. Now that’s a streak in all of Germany but Thuringia? Have a look at where their top politicians are from: Pretty much anywhere but Thuringia. MFs be like “rule better”, never “Ok I’ll do it”. The “rule better” part is definitely amply justified in Thuringia, their whole political system is dysfunctional, the state parties a clown show approaching American conditions. There should’ve been new elections years ago because the government didn’t have a proper working majority for important stuff, some CDU parliamentarians decided to ignore the health of the political system in favour of their own pensions and blocked those. CDU being corrupt is nothing new or specific to Thuringia, but this brazen? Sticking to “it’s technically legal” while the whole fucking state is shouting at you? Goshdamnit.
I’m really worried that the Verfassungsschutz talks and talks about the dangers the AfD poses, but they seemingly won’t actually do anything and I suspect by now it’s too late to prohibit them.
Yeah, it sucks. A party can’t be forbidden in Germany if it’s not “relevant enough”… But when they are relevant, it might be too late.
And AFD won’t “send migrants back” because that would remove their favorite Boogeyman. Expect don’t symbolic tinkering and not that much more, otherwise they have to start all over again with another minority to blame. It won’t improve these people’s economic situation. EU exit and austerity is back on the menu with AFD.
People in the comments attacking AfD voters as racists and rightly. However, no one wakes up one day and decide to be a racist from now on. There are reasons why these extremists gain political support and they draw it from a pool of people of which some wouldn’t even consider voting for them a few years ago. This shift reflects a social sentiment that everyone seems to be ignoring.
Fair point, I think we know it, just our politicians keep ignoring it. The elites backing moderate governments would rather see fascists on the throne, than to have a democratic, true leftist government.
Socialism endangers capitalism, fascism doesn’t.
The solution is definitely not ridicule and mocking, but it’s also not appeasing fascists. Anybody who wants to destroy democracy, has no place in a democracy. In the short term, we should ensure fascist don’t get to power by whatever means necessary, and in mid-/long term, we should enact social changes that decrease the support of these radicals.
Tbh I’m not sure this is possible peacefully (or at all), and maybe another world war will happen - though not because of Germany, more likely China/Rusia, maybe US if things go bad.
So, no one bothers to learn lessons from history any more…? Hmmm.
Issue is, they just change a few bits around to fool the people that are uneducated about the subject. I’m from Hungary, and one history teacher of mine taught me that Nazis did things for the sake of being evil, one other said “it was a punishment for the Jews killing Jesus”. Once you associate bigotry with being evil, any dumb rationale can make it look not evil in the eyes of these people.
They think history is based and also lies and also rad as hell and should definitely be repeated. But that bad mustache man should win this time.
It doesn’t help at all that history is rewritten all the time and is provably inaccurate at least in detail in a lot of cases.
I’m not a holocaust denier or saying the Nazis are any better than what history shows them, but I also can’t in good faith say that history is written in stone while southern US states are banning books right and left and making taboo teaching subjects. I’ve seen pushes in some areas that try to eliminate slavery and push the indentured servant narrative wide enough to cover all slavery.
