Comment by _fw
5 days ago
It’s not about immigration. If it was, then mainstream parties WOULD fix immigration.
It’s about national identity, “us and them”. If it wasn’t about immigrants it would be about “experts”. If it wasn’t about experts it would be about “the gays”.
This kind of thing doesn’t go away with appeasement: orgs like AfD just point their weapons at somebody else. It has always been the way with facists.
No, it IS about illegal immigrants. Claiming everyone supporting center/right/conservative values is automatically anti-gay is just wrong and toxic.
You just shifted from "immigration" to "illegal immigration".
Dual citizenship is as legal as you can get, the AfD opposed it until they realised it meant they could get away with later stripping undesirable people of German citizenship.
Germany decided to accept a million *perfectly legal* asylum seekers in the Syrian crisis, and another million from Ukraine. The AfD opposes it, even as they accept the suffering of Ukranians is real.
Germany is also in the EU, so has, totally lawful, free movement of people from every country they share a border with. The AfD opposes it.
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It is about immigration. The mainstream parties can't fix migration because Germany's political system makes it almost impossible to form majority governments. Coalition politics and the cordon sanitaire force the CDU to work with the left and seemingly the left's only consistent political position is opposition to migration reform.
The AfD aren't fascists and the attempts to win elections by just screaming slurs until they lose all meaning has stopped working. People have realised that calling everything "racist" or "fascist" or "Nazi" or whatever doesn't mean it actually is, and the left's entire political strategy is just labelling things it doesn't like with bad words.
And yes part of the issue with immigration is national identity. Germany is a nation-state and always has been, just like France and Poland and Italy and Spain and Portugal and Czechia and Hungary and Ireland and Greece are. There are still some non-national states in Europe like the UK (which contains multiple nations: England, Scotland and Wales, arguably part of Ireland (although some claim Northern Ireland has been separate long enough to have its own national identity) and arguably Cornwall if you listen to Cornish nationalists which you probably shouldn't).
Economic migrants, falsely claiming to be refugees, from Somalia and Syria, aren't German. Or French. Or Italian. Or Greek. They are Somalian, or Syrian. To pretend migration policy debates don't raise issues of national identity is fucking insane.
"Germany is a nation-state and always has been"
Do you think the systematic repression of Polish people during the German Empire, which was seen as necessary to achieve the 19th century ideal of a nation-state, was appropriate?
Because you make it sound like Germanisation was a good thing, as otherwise it wouldn't have been a nation-state.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation_of_Poles_during_...
> Within Bismarck's Kulturkampf policy, the Poles were purposefully presented as "foes of the empire" (German: Reichsfeinde).[7] Bismarck himself privately believed that the only solution to Polish Question was the extermination of Poles.[8] As the Prussian authorities suppressed Catholic services in Polish by Polish priests, the Poles had to rely on German Catholic priests. Later, in 1885, the Prussian Settlement Commission was set up from the national government's funds with a mission to buy land from Polish owners and distribute it among German colonists.
If that's what needed for a nation-state, I reject it as a worthy goal to achieve or use as a basis for identity, just like I reject my country's racist and expansionist history of exploiting African slaves and Native Americans as being something to re-attain.
(Apropos: "Frederick the Great ... likened the newly conquered West Prussia to a Prussian Canada and its inhabitants (which were German and Polish) to the Iroquois, who he saw as equally uncivilised.")
It was no more acceptable than any of the other things that happened in the 19th century.
How Germany became a nation-state, which was generally by the unification of German polities (like Italy, or as happened in France many many centuries earlier), is quite irrelevant to its status today as one. Poland basically expelled its German population after WW2 for example. There are presumably people still alive today that were expelled. That is much more recent history but it doesn't take away from the fact that Poland is a nation-state or make that somehow a bad or invalid status.
I didn't say it was a good thing to expel cultural minorities, and nation-states can and do obviously have cultural minorities without issue.
The problem is people denying that Germany is a nation, often denying the very notion that there is something validly called a nation. The problem is people saying that Germans don't have the right to control their borders and maintain their country as their country on this basis. There are people that think unironically that identifying ethnic groups is racist if you are doing it for any reason except to give "affirmative action" benefits to non-white ethnic minorities.
Your country is presumably the US so you likely have no actual conception of what a nation-state is. The US is not one.
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