Link to the article in spiked online. The article was heavily edited and shortened by spiked. The original text the article is based upon is to be found below:
Germany’s Descent into Left-Green Authoritarianism
The current German government is the least popular since the start of such surveys in 1997, and given that currently a staggering 76% of the population is dissatisfied with its performance, it is likely that it is the least popular since the Second World War. The reason for this is an ideology-driven politics that continues to praise the economic benefits of a “green transformation” and the social benefits of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” even as reality reflected in actual economic, social, and crime statistics proves that German industry is in decline, communities are financially and logistically overburdened by refugees or asylum seekers, and society is faced with a disproportionate increase in violent crime particularly against women, Jews, and homosexuals largely due to mass migration from Muslim countries.
The disaffection with the government manifested itself recently in widely reported protests of German farmers who see their livelihood threatened by the German government’s agricultural policies and general overregulation. Other societal groups with similar grievances joined the protests. While the left-leaning publicly financed broadcasters did their best to tarnish these protests as being subverted by “right-wing populists,” this accusation has lost its rhetorical force due to inflationary use, which, combined with the broad reporting on these protests, posed a serious problem for the government and put its legitimacy into question.
In this situation it was saved by the bell, namely by a report of an “investigative network” alleging that there was a “secret meeting” of “right-wing extremists” plotting the “mass displacement” of German citizens based on “racist criteria.” The publicly-financed broadcasters and other left-wing media swiftly served as multiplicators of these allegations, left-leaning protesters took to the street, and this in turn enabled the same broadcasters and multiplicators to now approvingly report on citizens protesting with government representatives against the opposition, instead of having to disapprovingly report on the continuing protests of rebellious farmers against the government.
Said government, in turn, immediately seized the opportunity to double down on its previous proposals to “foster democracy,” which in fact are their Orwellian opposites, namely attempts to curtail liberal democracy, free speech, and party competition at the expense of the Right and in favor of the German Left-Green. Accordingly, not only supposed “right-wingers” have expressed their concerns about the proposed measures, but also the Vice President of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Kubicki, a leading member of the Free Democrats, who together with the Social Democrats and the Green Party form the government coalition. Likewise, the former social democratic Minister for Culture and Finances of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Mathias Brodkorb, called the government plans “a disgrace for democracy.” Particularly embarrassing for the government is that the parliament’s very own scientific service has published a report that comes to the conclusion that the “law for fostering democracy” is in all likelihood unconstitutional.
This is hardly surprising. The law aims at providing alleged “non-government organizations” with a steady influx of government money. Such funding already exists, and it almost exclusively benefits leftist organizations; moreover, the government persistently objects to an “extremism proviso,” which would at least complicate funding left-wing extremists.
The novelty, however, is that grants are now supposed to switch from the temporary funding of a project to the long-term funding of an organization. Among the projects already funded now and promised more money in future are so-called Meldesysteme, that is, online denunciation portals where concerned citizens can denounce anyone who dares to say, for example, that there are only two sexes or that “transwomen” are men. The portals somewhat ironically interpret such statements as “anti-feminism” and dangerously right-wing.
Critics of such portals, in turn, view them as the continuation of the East German Stasi or the Nazi Blockwarte by other means. Far from “fostering democracy,” the purpose of the law is apparently to protect the Left from opposition by infiltrating and skewing civil society through government funding and by chilling dissident free speech.
The extent to which the current government dislikes free speech was also evidenced by a recent press conference of the Green family minister Lisa Paus. She openly defended said denunciation portals by referring to “the fact that hate on the internet also happens below the limits of criminal liability.” In other words, a government official declares legal speech to be an appropriate target for government interference. Unsurprisingly, sundry German legal scholars deem this to be unconstitutional and undemocratic.
Not so the social democratic Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser. Faeser, directly referring to the infamous “secret meeting” and the current “protests against the Right,” proposed various further measures of instrumentalizing state power against legal behavior. Among them are shaming (and in fact ominously threatening) those who finance “right-wing extremist” organizations (left-wing extremist organizations are not mentioned). Another measure is to have the Verfassungsschutz, a secret service charged with the defense of the constitution, call landlords or perhaps even employers and dissuade them from renting their premises or giving work to people the agency deems to be politically unreliable.
The current president of this agency, Thomas Haldenwang, who is Faeser’s subordinate, apparently has no problem with being instrumentalized for party politics. In fact, he might be the driver of such policies. Already in the past he has spoken out against the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a supposed right-wing party, in ways that contradict his obligation to remain neutral. And appearing at the same press conference where his boss defended her new measures, he explained that the democratic constitutional state must not only be “directed against” acts of violence, but also against “shifting verbal and mental boundaries.” One might think, though, that the democratic constitutional state should instead beware of secret services acting as language and thought police.
And indeed, recent criticism from liberal-conservative quarters of the Verfassungsschutz have been severe. Some commentators call for reform, others for abolition. However, such criticism can be costly. One such critic, a professor of international politics, got his security clearance for teaching at a center for the training of intelligence personnel revoked. This revocation was based on a report by the Verfassungsschutz, which criticized his views on migration. Moreover, the agency recently invented the entirely new and linguistically rather cumbersome category of “delegitimating the state in a way relevant for the protection of the constitution,” which critics contemptuously regarded as a thinly veiled attempt of the Verfassungsschutz to do some delegitimating of its own, namely of citizens’ criticism of the government – and, one may add, of the Verfassungsschutz itself.
In a Stalinistically paranoid turn of events, the agency has now even started “to gather material” about its own former president, the predecessor of Haldenwang, Hans-Georg Maaßen. Maaßen had already a while ago labeled the Green Party as a “partially extremist movement.” However, the “gathering of material” appears to only have started once Maaßen announced the formation of his own party, the Werteunion. This party can be located between the AfD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Leftists have already called for its prohibition. Likewise, calls to prohibit the AfD have never subsided, but recently become even louder. The Verfassungsschutz with its “gathering of material” would play a pivotal role in any legal proceeding for a prohibition of one of these parties. But while it is understandable that a leftist government having turned more than two thirds of the demos against itself might wish to have the Right simply prohibited or at least hampered by any means possible, such a wish and the accompanying measures do not express respect for the constitution, let alone democracy.
Nor does the will to avail oneself of lying propaganda. The sensationalist report on the “secret meeting” turned out to be a hoax. After the “investigative network,” which has demonstrably close ties to the government and is partly state-funded, was sued for defamation, its own lawyers stated that “it is not controversial in this proceeding that at the meeting the participants did not further consider in the context of the discussion whether German citizens with German passports can immediately be expelled on the basis of racist criteria. … On the contrary: Sellner has explicitly recognized German citizenship as a legal blockade for deportation.”
Yet the government seems not willing to let go of the convenient narrative of a right-wing conspiracy. If there was any conspiracy, however, it was not in fact one of “the Right” against Germans with migration background, but one of government-sponsored “journalists” in support of an unpopular government. One hand washes the other.
Uwe Steinhoff 