Comment by vrganj
11 hours ago
"Hiding your power levels" is a key strategy of the neofascist right. Make yourself look reasonable until you have enough power to do the despicable.
This explains why they are publicly denying what they are plotting in private.
Here's some choice quotes, translated to English.
"We must proceed completely peacefully and deliberately, adapt if necessary and butter up the opponent [literally: smear honey on their mouths], but when we are finally ready, we will put them all against the wall. (...) Dig a pit, all in and quicklime on top."
-- Holger Arppe, former AfD Vice Chair [0]
"The worse Germany is doing, the better it is for the AfD. [...] Therefore we have to consider a tactic between: How bad can things get for Germany? And: How much can we provoke? [...] Because then the AfD does better. We can always just shoot them all later. That's not an issue at all. Or gas them, or however you want. I don't care!"
-- Christian Lüth, AfD Press spokesman [1]
"It doesn't matter, nothing will change, even if we were to eat chalk [act harmless]. Even if we said: yes, we are separating from X, Y and Z now and acting moderate here."
-- Hans-Christoph Berndt, AfD Brandenburg senate leader [2]
[0] https://taz.de/Frueherer-AfD-Fraktionsvize-verurteilt/!56167... [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/afd-sprecher-wollte-fluc... [2] https://mik.brandenburg.de/sixcms/media.php/9/Einstufungsver...
Based on the political extremes in the US I had figured AfD would have its share of somewhat unsavory characters but this is almost comical. Are you sure the germans haven't confused meeting minutes and disney scripts? (I say, but then look at who we managed to elect.)
Yeah, as bad as unsavory characters in the US are, the AfD is full of straight-up, unrepetent Neonazis.
Like this is not just me mischaracterizing my political opponents, it is the most accurate label based on their behavior. They're the type of people who want to make the 1930s happen again in Germany.
This is why I react somewhat strongly when people try to relativize their abhorrence and make excuses, most frequently out of incorrectly mapping their own country's political systems.
I hope I could convince you that - especially given Germany's past and its commitment to never let this happen again - banning them is not some sort of political repression, but an immune response from democracy under attack. It is a manifestation of defensive democracy [0] , the principle written into the German constitution after the horrors of fascism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis in high ranking positions and actively covering this up is very much the exception the world over.
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
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