Germany using increasingly repressive measures against political opposition

Germany's Identitarian movement members are young and clean-cut, but the domestic intelligence agency has placed them under increased surveillance as a "verified extreme right movement."

By Carolyn Yeager

IN THE WAKE OF THE GROWING SUCCESS of anti-migration parties and their demand for protection of the national populations in Europe, the establishmentarians that remain in power are cracking down harshly and ramping up their anti-right rhetoric against any and all they see as threats to their control. In Germany we've seen the treatment of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West – founded in 2014), hit with bad press, frivolous lawsuits and intrusive investigation by domestic intelligence agencies. The founder of Pegida has been sidelined by Facebook in ways that make it difficult to find and read his content.

The Alternative for Germany nationalist, anti-immigrant party has also been demonized in the media and put under surveillance by the BfV, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and ostracized in Parliament by the group will of the other political parties. Rumors about campaign finance irregularities are circulated to impugn the honesty of the party leaders and suggest irresponsibility and corruption before it can be cleared up.

Another telling incident: Only two months ahead of the September state parliamentary election in Saxony, the election committee banned most of the AfD candidates because they were picked during two party congresses instead of one. Only the 18 who were selected at the first congress are eligible out of their 61 total, even though both meetings took place in Markneukirchen, which the party says should be considered as one "interrupted" party congress. The state chairman of the AfD, Joerg Urban, called it a "conspiracy" by the establishment - an effort to "weaken the strongest political competitor in the regional elections in Saxony", where the AfD had been widely expected to do very well. The committee that made the decision was staffed entirely by the AfD's direct competitors.

Urban said it can be difficult to find professionals to stand for the AfD because their social and professional lives are jeopardized if they do. He cited the case of Uwe Vertterlein who resigned as head of the Saxon Handball Association following controversy over his decision to stand as an AfD candidate in Dresden.

The latest victim of this reactionary pushback by the still-governing authorities is Germany's small Identitarian movement, launched in 2012. Yesterday (Thursday) the BfV announced it was stepping up observation of the group, after designating it a far-right extremist organization. This 'assessment' allows the security agency to utilize 'enhanced surveillance powers' against the group, which means using secret surveillance methods, and infiltration of their ranks with undercover investigators. In a formal statement, BfV President Thomas Haldenwang said the group:

"ultimately aims to exclude people of non-European origin from democratic participation and to discriminate against them in a way that infringes their human dignity."

"These verbal fire-raisers question people's equality and dignity, they speak of foreign infiltration, boost their own identity to denigrate others and stoke hostile feelings towards perceived enemies."

The German Identitarian movement is known to be very well behaved, is not associated with any sort of street violence, is estimated to have only about 600 members (at most), yet it is deemed a problem for the authorities overseeing the “most free Germany ever.”

Thomas Haldenwang, a hardliner against the political right, recently replaced the more centrist BfV president Hans-Georg Maassen over the trumped-up criticism of Maassen's handling of the misreported “riot” that took place in Chemnitz in August 2018. Since Haldenwang took over the office, the scrutiny of right-wing groups has been given priority to the point of harrassment.

“Blut und Boden”

This anti-Right sentiment is part and parcel of the post-war battle against the idea that people are genetically linked to their ancestral homelands, have a historical right to those homelands, and can keep out foreigners who disrupt the peace and tranquility of that homeland. The contemporary idea being pushed is that migration is a right for all people – if they don't like it where they are they cannot be stopped from forcing their way into a wealthier location and demanding support from the people there based on “humanitarian” rights.

Another giant error made is that everyone today insists they are not “racist,” but their objection to migration is based solely on preventing abuse of the migrants themselves because there are too many of them for the first-world economies to absorb. The validity of ancestral homelands for a unique people is compromised by such caving in to popular, media-approved, "nicey-nice" sentiments that are destroying our European way of life. The question we should all be asking is “Why is an ancestral homeland for a unique people accepted as a right for Jews/Israelis, but not as a right for Europeans, who certainly have far more claim to their land? I think the answer is that our leaders don't claim it for us, and we listen to them!

Tony Gerber, an Identitarian spokesperson said in 2017:

"We're not racists. We believe in equality: People may be different but they are equal. No Identitarian would say that someone else is a less worthy person because he is from a different culture, or a Muslim or refugee."

This is thoroughly modern, but dangerous, language. If people are different, they are not equal. If they are truly equal, their differences shouldn't matter. People can all be worthy without being equal. We have to be able to emphasize the differences.

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In the USA, the World Jewish Congress supports recycled, previously failed Holocaust Education bill

‘The Never Again Education Act’ was reintroduced in January by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) after failing to be enacted at a previous session of Congress. I wrote about it here, just last year.

The bill would federally mandate and fund a holocaust education grant program run by the Department of Education to provide teachers with training and tools to teach students about “the repercussions that hate and intolerance can have on our society.”

The World Jewish Congress has called on the US Congress to make Holocaust education mandatory in all US schools. The WJC started a petition late last week following recently released statistics that found 49% of millennials polled are unable to name one Nazi death camp, while 41% believed that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was significantly less than six million.

“The horrors of the Holocaust are fading from our collective memory, especially among millennials,” WJC explained, adding (the lie) that there has also been an “alarming rise” in antisemitism in the US over the last few years.

What's alarming is that this education act would create a federal law covering all K-12 schools in the United States—no schools or states can opt out!

If this isn't Jewish domination of the citizens of the United States, I don't know what is. Enforcing learning by young children of one small religious group's self-serving mythology, NOT BACKED BY SCIENCE OR FORENSICS, and historically controversial, is an insane thing for Americans to do. Let your congressman or congresswoman know that you're against this anti-American bill and you want to see it soundly defeated once and for all.