So you think one shouldn't call them nazis unless they re-enact nazi crimes? If not, would you care to elaborate, maybe relating to what I wrote? Or is the issue that I used
nazi instead of
neonazi?
WeepingElf wrote:It was in no way my intention to express sympathy or approval of the AfD!
And I in no way wanted to imply anything in that direction!
And I absolutely agree with you when you say many AfD voters don't want the nazis back, and with that the term is thrown around inflationary these days. It makes me furious when I see people on the (American*) internet calling Trump supporters nazis and saying he is "literally Hitler".
*Just stressing the American part here because I don't really browse the German side of the internet and I haven't heard this from people over here, which doesn't mean it's not happening etc
Then again...
WeepingElf wrote:(...) which I disapprove of because it tends to relativize the extraordinary atrocities the real Nazis committed.
I'm totally with you here again. On the other hand, this is literally what the AfD is doing. Apart from the quotes that made big headlines, like Höcke calling the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin a "monument of shame", as in shaming the German people, there are statements like that it's "a big problem that Hitler is being portryed as universally bad", that
we (the Germans) "have a right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in the World War", that it should be ok to commemorate the Wehrmacht "separately from the crimes they commited", that, in the context of Germany's Christian-Jewish cultural tradition, "Judaism is antagonistic to Christianity and thus is not to be considered as a part of Germany". The German government is portrayed as "marionettes" and "judiciary whore" of the Allies/the American-Jewish anti-German world conspiracy and that the established parties' goal is to wipe out the ethnic German population. The more disgusting quotes I can't even translate because of the very specific vocabulary known to Germans from NSDAP propaganda. This is just the tip of the iceberg, all of these statements come from high-ranking AfD politicians.
Their state- and regional unions are probably even worse. Commenting the outcome of the election, the Braunschweig AfD issued a statement how "for the first time in 60 years, the German people succesfully stormed the Reichstag". They attack organisations that work against antisemitism and neonazism, calling them "political inquisition" and "parasites" and, as I pointed out in my post above, they openly sympathize with neonazi organisations. But you get the image I guess.
WeepingElf wrote:it tells a lot that there is much infighting, to the point that the usual way for a chairperson to end the office term is to leave the party
This is also true for the NPD, they just never got this much attention in the media because they were never this relevant, and for a lot of extremist movements.Under Lucke, the AfD was a weird mix of economic liberals with otherwise a far-right political ideology, but already infiltrated by neonazis. Then during the refugee crisis, the far-right wing of the party pushed Lucke and his "moderate" fellows out, and Petry and her associates did their fair share to opening up the party to straight-up neonazis, and at least since Gauland took over, it's just a new, more powerful NPD with a neoliberal core in my opinion.
I'll repeat that I'm against pointing the finger on people and calling them nazis because they're more on the right, but I think it's also dangerous to underestimate the neonazi potential of the AfD, especially in times where it is becoming clear that the neonazi problem in Germany has been vastly underestimated (see the neonazi scandals in the German army, the busted terrorist group that also consisted of policemen that planned on murdering seleted politicians and other public figures, AND the ten-year neonazi terrorist series that went under the radar because how could this possibly happen in modern-day Germany).
And again I feel the need to end my post with something positibe, because, after all, Germany has been doing a good job in defending the
freedomly-democratic basic order on which this state was founded. And as much as I like to rant about this country, I like how professional most politicians act here. Nobody wants a Jamaika-coalition, but the general consensus is that this is how the German people voted, so it's the parties' job to make it work.
And compared to other countries, our alt-right movement is comparably small. Just yesterday I accidentally walked past the weekly Bärgida-demonstration, consisting of maybe a dozen concerned patriotic Europeans, looking completely lost. I didn't even know these weekly Pegida-demonstrations were still a thing to be honest, and the actions of the
Identitäre Bewegung are pretty much a list of almost hilarious fails aswell.
I guess my overall point is that I remember very well that, when it became clear for the first time that the AfD is to be taken seriously, a lot of people said they'll meet the same fate as every party on the right of the CDU/CSU and devour themselves, like every other such party did. Then they entered the first state parliaments and people shrugged it off as uneducated East Germans to be blamed. Now they're in the parliament and at least by now I think we should stop pretending like this is just another democratic anti-establishment party, especially because a big part of their voters are
not ok with the whopping neonazi sentiments within the party.
In the end though, I'm more curious than anxious how the AfD will do in the parliament. We'll see.
/Edit: Corrected some typos and realized this post got way longer than intended. Oh well, that's what I get for discussing politics online.