Just Like I Said: Germany’s Far Right Reunified, Too, Making It Much Stronger [ A Debate on Ethno-National Extremism in Europe, the US and Nigeria]
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
From: Kayode Adebayo kayu...@yahoo.com [NaijaObserver] <NaijaO...@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2020 at 15:31
This is exactly what I was saying to you the other day. This article has just been published today by New York Times.
Germany’s Far Right Reunified, Too, Making It Much Stronger
BERLIN — They called him the “Führer of Berlin.”
Ingo Hasselbach had been a clandestine neo-Nazi in communist East Berlin, but the fall of the Berlin Wall brought him out of the shadows. He connected with western extremists in the unified city, organized far-right workshops, fought street battles with leftists and celebrated Hitler’s birthday. He dreamed of a far-right party in the parliament of a reunified Germany.
Today, the far-right party Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials, AfD, is the main opposition in Parliament. Its leaders march side by side with far-right extremists in street protests. And its power base is the former communist East.
“Reunification was a huge boost for the far right,” said Mr. Hasselbach, who left the neo-Nazi scene years ago and now helps others to do the same. “The neo-Nazis were the first ones to be reunified. We laid the foundation for a party like the AfD There are things we used to say that have become mainstream today.”
As it marks the 30th anniversary of reunification on Saturday, Germany can rightly celebrate being an economic powerhouse and thriving liberal democracy. But reunification has another, rarely mentioned legacy — of unifying, empowering and bringing into the open a far-right movement that has evolved into a disruptive political force and a terrorist threat, not least inside key state institutions like the military and police.
"Today’s far-right extremism in Germany cannot be understood without reunification,” said Matthias Quent, a far-right extremism expert and director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society in the eastern state of Thuringia. “It liberated the neo-Nazis in the East from their underground existence, and it gave the far-right in the West access to a pool of new recruits and whole swathes of territory in which to move without too much oversight.”
For years, German officials trusted that a far-right party could never again be elected into Parliament and dismissed the idea of far-right terrorist networks. But some now worry that the far-right structures established in the years after reunification laid the groundwork for a resurgence that has burst into view over the past 15 months.
Far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau.
This summer, the government took the drastic step of disbanding an entire military company in the special forces after explosives, a machine gun and SS paraphernalia were found on the property of a sergeant major in the eastern state of Saxony.. A disproportionate number — about half — of those suspected of far-right extremism inside that unit, the KSK, were from the former East, its commander said.
Nationalism and xenophobia are more ingrained in the former East, where the murderous history of World War II was never confronted as deeply on a societal level as it was in the former West.. The AfD’s vote share is twice as high in the eastern states, where the number of far-right hate crimes is higher than in western ones.
Officially, there were no Nazis in old East Germany. The regime defined itself in the tradition of communists who had resisted fascism, giving rise to a state doctrine of remembrance that effectively exculpated it from wartime atrocities. Far-right mobs who beat up foreign workers from fellow socialist states like Cuba or Angola were classified as “rowdies” led astray by western propaganda.
But a potent neo-Nazi movement was growing underground. In 1987, Bernd Wagner, a young police officer in East Berlin, estimated that there were 15,000 “homegrown” violent neo-Nazis, of whom 1,000 were repeat offenders. His report was swiftly locked away.
Two years later, as tens of thousands took to the streets in anti-communist protests that eventually brought down the regime, the pro-democracy activists were not the only marchers..
“The skinheads were marching, too,” Mr. Wagner recalled.
The battle cry of those anti-communist protests — “We are the people” — later became the battle cry for the far right at anti-Muslim Pegida marches during the 2015 refugee crisis, far-right riots in Chemnitz in 2018, and again at the current anti-coronavirus protests.
Before reunification, the far-right scene in West Germany was small and aging, but now western neo-Nazis flocked east to offer “reconstruction aid” and unexpectedly found a refuge. Behind the wall, the East had been frozen in time, a largely homogeneous white country where nationalism was allowed to live on.
“The leaders of the western scene thought they were in paradise,” Mr. Hasselbach recalled.
Since then the East has become the home of choice for several prominent western extremists. Götz Kubitschek, a leading far-right intellectual from Swabia who wants to preserve the “ethno-cultural identity” of Germany, bought a rural manor house in the East, which serves as the headquarters for his far-right publishing house and research institute. So did Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz, two westerners who became leaders of the most radical factions of the AfD in the former East.
“The East has become a sort of retreat for the far right,” Mr. Quent said, “a place where Germany is still Germany and where men are still men.”
But the infatuation with the East is also strategic, he said. “There is a sense among far-right extremists: ‘We can’t win in the West, but we can win in the East and then, from a position of strength, we will take on the West.’”
Reunification also provided a physical space in which far-right members could move and train. Secret neo-Nazi training camps were held at abandoned Soviet military bases. At one of them, on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, Mr. Hasselbach took part in workshops on forging identity papers, bomb making, guerrilla warfare and “silent killing.”
The initial years after reunification were so tumultuous that security services were incapable of controlling this coalescing extremist movement.
“In the eastern states there was no mature structure for a domestic intelligence service,” Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the domestic intelligence office, said in an interview. “The agencies in the new states had to be built from nothing.”
During the early 1990s, a wave of racist violence swept through Germany, much of it in the East. Foreigners were chased, beaten up and sometimes killed. Asylum homes were firebombed. Buses of immigrants were attacked. Sometimes eastern onlookers would watch, clap or join in.
“You could see that something was shifting and not just on the fringes,” said Volkhard Knigge, a historian. “Otherwise the AfD would not be so strong today.”
In the early 1990s, Mr. Knigge moved east to run the memorial at the former concentration camp in Buchenwald. He was startled by the abundance of Nazi memorabilia like Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale at flea markets and by the mob of angry young neo-Nazis who would gather on the historic theater square, shouting xenophobic slogans.
We thought democracy had won,” Mr. Knigge said. “The West thought this was the end of history. But for nationalists, this was a revision of history.”
Reunification brought two strains of nationalism together, said Anetta Kahane, a Jewish anti-racism activist — western-style nationalist conservatism and a more radical eastern social-revolutionary variety. On their own, neither had been powerful enough to stir a political movement.
“It was the marriage of the two that made the AfD possible,” said Ms. Kahane, who runs the Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, named after a Black Angolan who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by neo-Nazis less than two months after reunification.
For most Germans, the new century was defined by progress. Chancellor Angela Merkel, an easterner, has personified western liberal values. When the country was host to the soccer World Cup in 2006, a confidently multicultural Germany was on display, in what many at the time called “a summer fairy-tale.”
“I wanted to believe that that’s who we are as a country — and I did believe it,” said Tanjev Schultz, an author and journalism professor. “But it wasn’t true.”
That summer, the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group that had come out of the extremist networks formed in East Germany, was engaged in an immigrant killing spree that the police would not discover until 2011.
From 2000 to 2007, the group killed nine immigrants and a police officer, even as paid informers of the intelligence agency helped hide its leaders and build up its network.
Mr. Hasselbach said he was not surprised to see the recent revelations of far-right infiltration of security services. When he was still a neo-Nazi, he said, friendly police officers would warn them before raids or hand them files of leftist enemies.
It was the deadly violence in the early 1990s that made Mr. Hasselbach leave the neo-Nazi scene in 1992.. An arson attack on the home of a Turkish family killed two girls and their grandmother. He spent years underground to escape threats from his former far-right compatriots. Then, with Mr. Wagner, the former eastern police officer, he co-founded Exit Germany, an organization that helps extremists leave their networks.
The fortunes of the AfD have ebbed and flowed in recent years. Polls show that voter support has dipped to around 10 percent during the pandemic. But the fringes are radicalizing, intelligence officers say.
It worries Mr. Hasselbach and Mr. Wagner.
“The readiness to commit violence today is greater than it’s ever been,” Mr. Hasselbach said.
“Westerners have no feel for how fragile things are,” Mr. Wagner said. “The elites don’t see the post-democratic decline. Easterners have seen a system collapse before.”
On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 5:38 AM, Kayode Adebayo<kayu...@yahoo.com> wrote:Osita Ebiem:America is not your father's land. Nigeria is. You all ran away from your Fulani neighbors of Futa Jalon. You were friends with the Fulani in the precolonial times. You wined and dined with the Fulani in the Futa Jalon before both you and your friendly neighbors migrated to the present day Nigeria.You had the same characteristics as the Fulani. You walked with sticks like the Fulani. You tied wrappers around your waist like the Fulani. You wandered around and migrated from place to place like the Fulani. You had and still have a lot in common with the Fulani today. All of a sudden, your Fulani friends and neighbors of the Futa Jalon and the Volta Region became your enemies.Instead of confronting your friends turned enemies called Fulani, you all ran away from Nigeria. Running away from your father's land wouldn't solve your problems. You supposed to confront your problems head-on. Otherwise, your Igboland would be overrun and occupied by the Fulani in your absence and you would have no place to go back to when you all get deported from America in the future, due to Robots and Artificial Intelligence taking over 60% of American jobs and Americans deciding to blame you and other foreigners for their misfortunes and loss of jobs to machines, because you were not born in America. You all acquired your citizenship by naturalization, which can be easily deactivated by legislation, executive order or court order.Donald Dumb's fascist, authoritarian and tyrannical regime is an example of things to come in the Western World in the future and it didn't start yesterday. It started a while ago with the Tea Party in America and graduated to the Trump's fascist and authoritarian administration that has since destroyed every institution in America and simultaneously destroying the fabrics of America, all in the dubious name of nationalism and Make America Great Again. Trump's fascism is also spreading fast around the Western World as fascist and ultra nationalistic administrations are taking over and it would only get worse in the future.You will all have yourselves to blame in the future, when you have no place to go back to.America is another man's country, not yours and it will never be.Kayode
On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 1:33 AM, Osita Ebiem<osita...@yahoo.com> wrote:Choosing America over Partisanship
By Osita Ebiem
The 2020 American presidential election has elicited a great national discuss which borders on the raison d’etre of the country itself. It turns out that the consequences of the outcome of this election are bound to outlast November 3, 2020. It is because of the importance of the outcome of this election that I feel obligated to contribute to the discussion. My ethnicity is Igbo and Igbo people are basically conservative. Though the Igbo are adventurous and outgoing but they are also fiercely nationalistic (they will give anything to defend Igbo land.) So it is easy for them to identify with patriotic Americans today at this time that the country seems to be at a moral crossroads. Igbo conservative values make it easy for them to take positions when it comes to any great moral question such the ongoing American national debate. The early twentieth century American Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen could not have said it better when he said that; “The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil.” He still went on to say that; “The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.” These statements by the bishop are so relevant today in America’s public space.
Since the founding of the American republic nearly two and half centuries ago the outcome of this year’s presidential election is going to be one of the most significant. Apparently what is at stake is the very essence of America; that is the founding values of the United States of America. The price is huge and it is not a time for anyone to sit on the fence and say or do nothing. It is time for all lovers of this country to get involved. But it is not enough to choose sides and you must not only follow your heart, you must go a step further to find out and stand with the side that will fight to preserve and defend what America stands for. For your participation and vote to worth the while this November it is important to get well informed. This is not the time to follow the mob instead let your decision be based on personal honest and dispassionate convictions that are reached through the knowledge of what is true.
America succeeded mostly due to the genius of its founding principles. But among those principles it is doubtless that America’s capitalist market ideals and freedoms contributed the most to this success. In the 1950s and 1960s, especially starting from the years of the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower the United States which made up only about 5% of the world’s population produced more than half of the world’s manufactured goods. The lesson here is that societies succeed when they combine sound national economic ideals without the encumbrances of overreaching government bureaucracy, and a nationalistic leadership that takes seriously the idea of love for the country and is sincere enough to inspire a lot of patriotic fire in the nation’s citizens. Another important lesson from history which we cannot miss here is that great national leaders are not always great politicians. Just like Eisenhower who was more of a military leader than an orthodox politician so is Trump today more of a businessman than a mainstream politician. The United States became the world’s greatest production powerhouse not through orthodox sleek political talking but through honest and sincere creative leadership, the will to act and the ability to inspire in the ordinary citizens the need to believe in themselves and to love their country.
The 50s and 60s were America’s roaring and glorious days. Yes, for some who are still skeptical, there was a time when America was indeed great. But with the passage of the years America began to gradually lose its grit to the extent that some of its misguided leaders began to eye some fantastical socialistic non-capitalist market ideals. And they actually began to call for the total elimination of institutions that maintain the society’s law and order. But as the voice of unreason got louder so was the nostalgic feeling and yearning of those patriots who understand the dangers which such an un-American alternative poses for the country and its people. It is such that true American patriots today are calling for an urgent return of America to its former glorious days of great accomplishments and national pride.
Through their campaign slogan the current Republican American President Donald Trump and his campaign team seem to have captured and embodied this American people’s collective longing for the good old days of America. As such Americans are gradually coming to terms with the effectiveness of the Trumpian style of leadership which has renewed in the citizens a new sense of optimism and confidence in the country. A majority of Americans are once again starting to believe again in the ideals of the country. Hope is once again being restored and there is a general feeling that with a little bit of more patriotic leadership even if unorthodox, that America will become even greater still.
The Trumpian campaign refrain or slogan to; “Make America Great Again” is founded on the historical fact that America was great and needs to be restored. It is also based on the yearning and aspiration of patriotic Americans and lovers of America. This Trumpian political idea is based on the fact of American history so the detractors may as well try and get used to it as it is not going away anytime soon. The idea is not just a mere political gimmick or a fad that will fade away anytime soon. Instead my prediction is that after this administration the idea will continue to win in the foreseeable future for any savvy American politician who will like to cash in on its resonance in history if he or she will be ready to give it all and the best there is. The understanding of this fact will help clear the minds of those who have wondered constantly why the slogan has resonated so deeply with many patriots and lovers of the United States of America. The idea of restoring America’s glorious days resonates with the people today because many people are convinced that some past American leaders had either inadvertently or deliberately pushed the country to the edge of the precipice as it is.
The cry by Trump’s campaign that they want to make America great again continues to find large audiences and a great following because as many readers will agree, over the years America’s greatness actually began to slip through the fingers of its career politicians and business leaders. Due to many false steps and poor decisions by its politicians America became a beached fish, washed up and panting for breath. America’s political and business leaders beached America as they toyed with and tossed the American mystic and prestige to American state enemy swine. Within living memory of many generations of Americans, past American administrations became careless and took the American country for granted. At first the slips were happening in sputters here and there and then the bars were removed and the sludge came in torrents, threatening to drown out all the grandeurs and beauties of the United States. To the dismay of many patriots America was rapidly turning into the mythological Augean stable.
An example is that soon American negotiators and leaders in politics and business began to recklessly concede more and more ridiculous grounds in every deal and agreement until it almost became a complete sale out of the American dream and country. In no time America was belonging to no one, and any soiled and sacrilegious hand could fondle the beautiful bride. America had become ditched by those who should protect, love and cherish her. And like a naïve and inexperienced rich street worker anyone could have a piece of America. Increasingly America lost at every negotiation table and was always dealt with the short end of the stick. The downward slide gained speed with every new deal that subsequent administrations went into and for many watchers the American ship was not too far from the edge of the precipice.
Gradually these less patriotic gladiators of American politics and business seemed to have killed off the guardians of American soul and, the American state became an orphaned republic and the responsibility of no one. Soon there was a widespread belief that protective borders, laws, rules and standards were no longer necessary.. The enforcers of the national will could be disbanded as national orderliness had become a burden. America was now up for sale. And no one dared to defend the United States of America. As it became an all-comers republic. America became an all-comer’s game where anyone could come to play. There was this overt invitation that even those who do not know or believe in the rule of the game (what America stands for) could come to play. The rule of the game is that there are no rules. All players are allowed to make their own private rules and play by them. It doesn’t matter because all the umpires have been sent off the field. It was made clear that now any player is allowed to stand, sit or kneel to play this new and twisted American game. The concept of right and wrong in the nation’s psyche became warped. And it was projected that by the time the game is over everyone will be a winner except the United States of America and her true patriotic citizens.
Domestic enemies of the state shouted the loudest calling for the dismantling of the very fabrics of the American state. The systemic vetting process of the American political class was being rattled and attacked from all sides. As this call to kill the systemic standards of the U. S. gained more ground the very dangerous proverbial tyranny or oppression of the masses was also gaining ground. The now ungrateful and biggest beneficiaries of the standard American system would rather that the country is burned down to the ground if they would no longer be allowed to create America into an unrecognizable and un-American image. They unleashed on America a dumbed down and clueless fringe masses for whom beauty and art and historical monuments are eyesores. In their mad pursuit for power for its sake these internal enemies of the republic insist that a vast majority of the dumb masses should now have the prerogative to select and elect those who appeal to their undiscerning sentiments instead of those who represent the true rational American state. So, it became easy for some of these classless and reckless Washingtonian lifetime career politicians to shamelessly call for the abandonment of the age old and time-tested and trusted Electoral College of the American political institution.
These supposedly custodians and indeed beneficiaries of the American dream became convinced in the exaggeration of their personal clout and in their private belief that America was just like any other nation on Earth and that America was not special after all. Like a neglected garden abandoned by its paid caretakers America the beautiful became overgrown with the weed of fantasy mongers. America was losing in every known beauty pageant halls. America’s once well-manicured and properly kept beautiful and enviable first place garden in the world was being eroded before the eyes of many dismayed patriots and friends alike. It was at this point that it became clear to all that for America to continue in the competition then it must have her hero that this moment demands. Everyone got convinced that the American nation must have her national knight in shining armor, an unabashed national makeup artist. At this critical point the country needs an American knight that understands that for America to remain competitive and the best she must be remodeled and all her negotiating instruments retooled to fit the current realities of this twenty first century world. Today, many watchers believe that Trump and his administration fit the mold of this much needed American hero.
As we go on with this discussion it may be necessary to point out that this unfortunate predicament of America hovering at the brink as we described earlier did not come as a surprise to many social observers. It has always been clear to all students of history that once any society loses or begins to fail to appreciate and embrace their identity or maybe become ashamed of who they are, then they are headed for a fall. The truth is that it is the sum total of a people’s past that is responsible for whatever greatness or otherwise there is in their present. Therefore, whatever beauty and excellence that all, including the undiscriminating critics have come to enjoy in America today came directly from what the Americans had been and done in the past. It is therefore immoral to accept and enjoy the benefits and prestige of these America’s historical national credits while rejecting the patriarchs who worked so tirelessly to accumulate these credits. And once a people begin to apologize for and abdicate their self-identity then they will become indecisive and unsure of their present self and their destiny. Therefore, it goes without saying that for America to become great again America and Americans must recover their national identity and learn to once again become self-confident by recovering their lost faith in the sufficiency of the American national identity.
Every American must come to the realization that as a people, their country occupying the first position in the world was not by accident. Americans must become aware that being the world’s greatest productive and economic powerhouse was justifiably earned because the people worked for it. It is incontestable that the goods and services that were made in America were good and of superior quality. American products were great because they were manufactured with honesty while applying the highest of standards. For several years through dint of hard work, sound economic and political planning and innovative management and unparalleled high sense of patriotism America achieved the kind of greatness that the world had never seen before. She became rich, powerful and at the same time benevolent and incomparably generous. America became the City on the Hill, the desire and attraction of all people everywhere. People worked hard to make America become the model of what every society and country should be. Because Americans worked, the United States of America helped to change the world for the better. Through America’s wealth and generosity the rest of the world became richer, humane and more accountable.
America became great not through mere luck but most of all through good thinking which is what produced its framework of existence, the American constitution. So far the people have honestly worked hard to protect and to preserve this constitution. They accepted with time to make amends to further expand its scope and enable it to accomplish greater good for the greater number of its citizens. It is therefore right that at this crossroads of a national moral crisis that the country and her people must renew their faith in the country’s Judeo-Christian founding principles which has helped to shape the American Republic. The American principles cannot be as wrong as some of the detractors are projecting otherwise they would not have produced the greatest national success story of all time.
As we round up this discussion we have to stress that the outcome of the upcoming November presidential election in the United States will be pivotal and perhaps the most important since the last 150 years. This will be the election for the very essence of America. The United States will rise or fall based on the outcome of this election. The reason why is because a nation rises or falls based on how the people choose to see themselves. A people’s culture or way of life is all they have and they cannot afford to toss and trample on it. A people’s culture or way of life is what makes or mars their nation. The outcome of this November presidential election will show the direction to which the American people have chosen for their country. It will be a choice between continuing to take the country on the path to greatness or a reversal to retrogression and death.
At this point true American patriots must avoid the temptation of pursuing power by all means. For the country it is dangerous and for the power grabbers it is dishonorable. Sometimes, it is the difference between a successful and prosperous country and the so-called third world countries. The primary purpose of every social and political power should be to serve and do good for the people within the jurisdiction of those powers. When powers are sought and held for reasons different from those they become corrupted and debased. What is worse is that it reduces those individuals who possess the power to the level of the dishonorable.
That this national conversation has persisted for so long in the direction to which it is proceeding explains unfortunately, how far gone in the road that leads to nowhere that the negative forces have dragged America. These forces are out to erase the well-recognized American image and replace it with something very different and far removed from what everyone knows as America. But all hope is not lost, collectively the discerning and collective Americans can still choose to save the country from further descent to the brink of a third world abyss.
Right from the onset many discerning Americans have always been convinced that the Wuhan Virus or as the President calls it, the Chinese Virus may not have been too far from another contrived arsenal in the repertoire of a presidential impeaching mob. But whatever it might be it is the argument of this writer that at this point the nation must choose to come together. For the sake of country let’s swallow our personal pride and choose to unite to save and preserve this great country as the last bastion of liberty, light and freedom on Earth. Let all Americans, both the dissenting and assenting patriots come to terms with the truth and reality of this moment. For the sake of these United States we as a nation must come together now and elect a leader that has the capacity and will to restore America to its former glory and pride. For the love of country let’s leave partisanship aside and choose to make America great again.
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