Imagine the government of a liberal democracy tells the ethnocultural group that constitutes the vast majority of the state’s citizens that it is impermissible to regulate migration in a way that would preserve the majority status of said group and the culture of the country. Imagine, further, the government allows for the uncontrolled influx of hundreds of thousands, nay millions of migrants from groups amongst which the following types of individuals are massively overrepresented in comparison to the receiving country’s indigent population: terrorists, knife and machete attackers, murderers, rapists, as well as anti-Semites and enemies of liberalism, democracy, women’s and homosexuals’ rights. Imagine also the government and its state-funded pseudo-NGOs call everyone a “racist,” “Islamophobe,” “right-wing extremist,” or even “Nazi” who dared to point out said statistical facts in the midst of a murder, terrorism, stabbing, rape, and gang-rape epidemic of unprecedented proportions, even though the country’s very own official police statistics of “crimes in the context of migration” clearly registers the exponential increase of such crimes as well as the fact that members of some migrant groups – the usual suspects – disproportionately commit them. Imagine still further that the government generously supports illegal immigrants who have no business being in the country in the first place, to the extent that half of the many billions of welfare support called “citizen’s money” ironically goes to foreigners, including to those disproportionately figuring in the crime statistics. Imagine also the government actively sabotages efforts to deport illegal aliens, even those who have committed heinous acts, and appears to be illegally advising its embassies to ignore visa requirements when it comes to the importation of certain groups even though they pose problems already. Imagine further that on the rare fig-leaf occasion a mere handful of the thousands of murderers or rapists are indeed deported to their country of origin, they get 1000 Euros as a departing gift. Imagine, finally, that when a political party says “Enough of this” and voters vote for it, the votes are being called “undemocratic” and calls for the party’s isolation or even prohibition abound.
“Postcolonial” double standards and the allegedly extremist Alternative for Germany
If you have imagined all this, you have imagined Germany in 2024. Now, if anything like this happened, say, in an African or Arab country and the migrants in question were white, professors and students of “postcolonialism” at universities like Berlin, Oxford, or Princeton would celebrate the rise of this new party as a sign of hope and an act of resistance against a local government betraying its own population for the benefit of foreign colonizers. Yet given that this happens in Germany and the migrants aren’t white, said party – the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) – is depicted as “right-wing extremist” and its most charismatic representative, Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the province of Thuringia, almost as a revenant of Adolf Hitler.
Moreover, if anything like this happened in an African or Arab country, Western journalists would hardly trust the respective governments to paint an accurate picture of the opposition. In the German case, however, Western journalists show little such reticence. An additional problem for foreign journalists is that they often fail to appreciate the government ties of German organizations or the politically motivated manipulative character of certain statistics, especially when those statistics fit their own preferred narrative.
Crime statistics in the context of uncontrolled immigration: Rape and murder on the rise
To wit, recently a number of influential English language newspapers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have, relying on German police statistics, claimed that almost all antisemitic crimes in Germany are perpetrated by alleged “far-right” forces. What these newspapers failed to note, and perhaps don’t know, however, is that the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, roughly equivalent to the FBI), the ultimate source of these statistics, by default counts antisemitic acts as right-wing although it is meanwhile well-known that the overwhelming majority of such acts in Germany are committed by Muslims. The government and the BKA do not even deny this anymore, but still continue this counting practice. The reason for this is, of course, that the government is interested in selling right-wing extremism as the biggest threat, as it has done for years, while downplaying the dangers created by uncontrolled mass migration.
These dangers are considerable. From 2015 to date, there have been at least 429 homicides and over 10,000 cases of rape or sexual assault involving at least one foreign suspect (my own calculation based on BKA statistics). Among rapists with a German passport, German perpetrators with Muslim “migration background” are massively overrepresented. Gang rapes (now two per day, a 90% increase since 2015) are particularly popular, for example among Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis, who also appear disproportionately in the murder and general rape statistics. Moreover, as the government itself had to disclose, politicians of the AfD, not of the other parties, are the main victims of political violence in Germany. This is another fact rarely noted in foreign media, but then again, it also isn’t noted by left-leaning or state-financed media in Germany.
The opposition’s “extremism” is proclaimed by an “office for the protection of the constitution” that serves a government agenda
Of course, the AfD could still be a right-wing extremist party. However, in the German context an extremist party is one that actively tries to undo the “liberal-democratic basic order” (freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung). Part of this basic order is not only democracy (which need not be parliamentary democracy) but also respect for human dignity, which would be violated, for example, by treating certain races as having lesser worth than others (the mere stating that some races have lesser worth than others would not necessarily count as such unconstitutional treatment but as an exercise of freedom of speech). The German Verfassungsschutz, the domestic intelligence agency charged with the protection of the constitution, claims that the AfD is indeed extremist, and many on the left, including politicians from the governing parties, would therefore like to prohibit the party – a possibility the German constitution indeed provides for.
However, neither in its federal nor in its provincial (Länder) incarnations are these “guardians of the constitution” independent of the government. Rather, their presidents are political officers (politische Beamte) who can be discharged by the respective ministers of the interior. In addition, while there are parliamentary committees responsible for overseeing the work of these agencies, the other parties exclude members of the AfD from seats on these committees (just as they unconstitutionally exclude them from money for party foundations). In fact, in recent months, not least due to the openly biased public statements of Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the federal agency, even critics from social-democratic and decidedly anti-AfD quarters as well as constitutional lawyers have charged the alleged “guardian of the constitution” with degenerating into a kind of politically weaponized thought police.
Moreover, 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. One could get the impression that the guiding principle is to keep the opposition small. Or as a member of the left-wing party Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht stated in the context of a very recent attack on freedom of speech by the Bavarian Verfassungschutz (the agency back-pedaled after being slapped with injunctions issued on behalf of several media outlets who felt libeled): “Unfortunately, anyone who wants to defend fundamental rights now has to protect the constitution from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.”
The argumentative case for the AfD’s “extremism” is construed and partisan
Thus, when it comes to the question of who is and who is not “extremist” in Germany, one is ill-advised to simply take the word of the domestic intelligence service for it. Instead one needs to look at the actual “arguments” and presumed “evidence.” These are rather thin, however.
To wit, the central argument, as noted in the service’s yearly report in 2023 (and previously), is that the AfD has a concept of the people that contradicts the German constitution. The agency even claims the AfD’s concept is völkisch. They do not explain what they mean by this, but according to the decisive German dictionary, the Duden, which in this context explicitly mentions National-Socialism,a völkisch concept would conceive of a people as a race. However, the AfD does no such thing (nor does the agency even attempt to prove otherwise). On the contrary, in his interview book, Höcke rejects any such race-based concept as ludicrous. Thus the use of the term völkisch by the Verfassungschutz looks suspiciously like a rhetorical attempt to associate the AfD with the Nazis (about whom Höcke has nothing positive to say either).
It is true, though, that the AfD explicitly distinguishes the German people understood as the collective of all people who have German citizenship from the German people as an ethnocultural group. And it would like to preserve the latter (just as Israeli political parties would understandably like to preserve the character of Israel as a Jewish state), especially through certain migration restrictions. The “guardians of the constitution,” however, appear to deem this very aim unconstitutional. But it clearly is not, as long as it is pursued without the state discriminating against German citizens who are not also simultaneously members of the German ethnocultural group – the existence of which is both recognized by the German constitution itself and by the Ministry of the Interior, which vows to “preserve and develop the ethnocultural identity” of Germans abroad. Therefore, the following verdict by Dietrich Murswiek, professor emeritus of constitutional and administrative law at the University of Freiburg, seems apt: “Through its reasoning, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution makes itself an instrument of the government. It defends the current immigration policy with this justification and serves to eliminate any opposition to it. … Instead of protecting the constitution, the BfV [the federal Verfassungsschutz] is damaging democracy.”
The red herring of “Islamophobia”
A further “argument” of the agency is that the AfD is “anti-Islamic”. This reproach is silly. After all, Germany is not an Islamic Republic; parties and citizens therefore can be as anti-Islamic as they please without thereby acting against the constitution. Of course, they must respect the religious freedom of citizens, but they most certainly need not respect the religion itself.
A still further claim is that the AfD sometimes says unpleasant things about Muslims. Yet mostly the AfD merely states statistical facts, well established by Germany’s very own crime statistics, that other parties would prefer to sweep under the rug. Nonetheless, the agency would like to derive from the AfD’s often harsh rhetoric an intention to grant Muslim citizens lesser rights than other citizens (although the AfD explicitly and categorically states that it intends no such thing). However, as long as the agency does not draw an equivalent conclusion in light of the decades-long raving of leftist parties against people on the right of the political spectrum (the German constitution prohibits state discrimination on the basis not only of religion, but also of ideology), its inference seems to be a case of selective prosecution, as it were.
Orwell in Germany: “Defending democracy” by outlawing the opposition
Moreover, on the left there are not only words, but discriminatory deeds. The already mentioned manipulative statistics that attribute antisemitic acts committed by Muslims to people on the right is a case in point. Moreover, the government supports 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. Critics of such portals view them as the continuation of the East German Stasi by other means. They are manned by leftists and directed against opinions on the right. And finally, in midst of a rising number of violent attacks on politicians, Nancy Faeser, the Minister for the Interior, announced tough measures in defense of “the democratic forces in our country.” However, the term “democratic forces” in the mouths of leftist German politicians is a dog whistle for “not the AfD.” This was also noted by some commentators from liberal-conservative quarters, who accused Faeser of implicitly legitimating violence against the right. In light of all this, the government’s criticizing the AfD as “undemocratic” appears almost driven by an Orwellesque slogan: Outlawing the opposition is democracy.
Björn Höcke, the bogeyman of the German left
What, at last, about Björn Höcke, the supposedly most “extremist” among prominent AfD politicians? Well, comparing his diabolical reputation with his actual statements is somewhat anticlimactic. To wit, while the left claims that his interview book demonstrates his intent to overthrow the liberal-democratic basic order, they never show this (and most leftists who refer to this book in horror have clearly never read it). This is not surprising, because there is simply no hint for such a design in the entire book.
To wit, the statement from the book that is almost compulsively being presented as decisive incriminating evidence is his assertion that a restrictive migration policy could not be implemented without some “well-tempered cruelty.” What is rarely noted in this context, however, is that this statement, with the same wording, was originally made by the world-renowned German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. While the German Left hates him (like Slavoj Žižek he has the nasty habit of pointing out facts that don’t fit leftist narratives), it would be a remarkable leap to deduce from his assertion a hostility towards the liberal-democratic basic order (incidentally, Sloterdijk dislikes the AfD).
Sloterdijk’s prose often prefers bombast to precision, and the formulation “well-tempered cruelty” is, indeed, truly idiotic; but all that is meant is clearly that restrictive immigration policies have to be sufficiently aversive and would inevitably come with collateral damage in the form of suffering on the side of would-be immigrants. This is at least honest, on the part of both Sloterdijk and Höcke. Conversely, the German government never felt any need to acknowledge that unrestricted migration will come with collateral damage in the form of suffering of the German people, something the 10,000 rape victims could confirm. In fact, to the extent that crimes of migrants are acknowledged by the government at all, this acknowledgement tends to take the form of blaming the victims or at least German society. Maybe there is less bias and more humanity to be found in Höcke than in German government representatives.
Nonetheless, several German newspapers have listed quotes from Höcke that are supposed to show just how evil he is. Yet again, this list does not quite fit the Satanic hype. For instance, in the context of discussing the politics of remembrance he (in)famously said that the German people is the only one that has “planted a monument of ignominy (Schande) in the heart of their capital.” He was interpreted, by interested parties, as thereby stating that the Holocaust memorial is ignominious. But according to the semantic and grammatical rules of the German language the sentence says that the memorial is a reminder of the ignominy of the Holocaust and that other countries don’t allow their ignominies to take central stage. Höcke has repeatedly clarified this (although it would not need clarification for a competent German speaker).
An allegedly racist statement of Höcke is his attributing to Africans and Europeans different reproduction styles, claiming that “the life-affirming African dispersal type meets the self-negating European placeholder type.” However, first, he does not talk of races here; second, if racism is the affirmation or implication that one race is superior to another, then the statement is not racist, but rather an empirical statement, whether correct or incorrect – not a value judgment. Third, if “racism” means the view that there are differences between cladistic or genetically clustered races, then the statement might be racist, but then racism is not objectionable in itself, for the correct statement that sickle cell anemia is more prevalent among Africans than Europeans would be “racist” in this sense, but both morally innocuous and correct.
Höcke has also been convicted of using an alleged “Nazi slogan,” namely “Everything for Germany.” Höcke denied that he knew that it was prohibited (the slogan was certainly neither invented nor uniquely used by the Nazis), but the judge claimed he must have known since he was a history teacher. However, that it is common knowledge among history teachers that the phrase is prohibited is an assumption the judge made without plausibility and evidence, which is why some judicial experts deem the ruling to be politically motivated and unjust. Moreover, in Germany so-called “propaganda offenses” are basically reserved for the right. But if you get convicted for “Everything for Germany” but not for “All power to the Soviets” or even “All right-wingers into the Gulag”, then this is not a sign of Höcke’s right-wing illiberal tendencies but rather one of Germany’s left-wing ones, in particular as far as free speech is concerned.
To give one final example of a quote supposed to reflect badly on Höcke: He stated that Angela Merkel’s opening the borders was an “asylum-political amok run.” So, evidently he strongly disagrees – as meanwhile does the larger part of Merkel’s party – with a policy that overburdens Germany’s municipalities, exploits tax payers for the benefit of masses of foreigners, stresses the housing market to breaking point, leads to cultural changes the majority of Germans rejects, and has produced more than 400 homicides and 10,000 rape victims. Gee, he must be a fascist!
© Uwe Steinhoff 2024
Uwe Steinhoff 