Clarissa's Blog

From an excellent long article on AfD by Christopher Caldwell:

Harald Martenstein, a conservative columnist for Welt and hardly an AfD backer, took part in a debate in Hamburg last winter over whether to ban the AfD, and shocked the audience by contemptuously throwing the question back at his mostly progressive audience. “You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”

https://firstthings.com/

It’s not paywalled, so you can read the whole thing. And it’s exactly what I say. If anybody in Germany really thinks that AfD is dangerous, defeating it would be extremely easy. All you need to do is listen to the people who want less migration, deportations, and cheap energy. But everybody to the left of AfD, not only in Germany but in Western Europe at large, clearly decided that everything should be sacrificed to the cause of mass migration. The economy, women’s rights, gay rights, the welfare state: all of it has been thrown away to get more Muslim migrants.

People say that Alice Weidel is being hypocritical, leading a far-right political party while being a lesbian. But she explained that in a speech that I listened to in the original German. She said that you can’t have your queer lifestyle while welcoming millions of people from a culture that despises gays. I don’t like Wiedel, but I agree. I strongly believe that it is a great and wonderful achievement of Western civilization that gay people should be able to live their lives unmolested and unpersecuted. It is also a great and wonderful achievement that women should be able to be out in public unmolested and unbothered. That this all of a sudden became a far-right position is weird, but that’s how things are.

One of the times I was in Germany, there was a big manifestation going on next to my hotel. The organizers of my event were reluctant to answer questions about the manifestation. Finally, when I said that I was going to walk over to the gathering and check it out for myself, they explained that it was a Nazi parade and I shouldn’t go.

“Real Nazis?” I asked. “There are that many of them? How come?”

After a lot of wrangling, I managed to drag it out of the organizers that this was an AfD rally. It looked like even pronouncing the name of the party was painful to these three wonderful German academics.

This was in the fall of 2019, and I’m thinking, if you really believe that AfD are Nazis, wouldn’t you do something to weaken their prospects? If a return of Nazism is at stake, why wouldn’t you just close the borders already, develop nuclear power, and start deporting migrant criminals? Either you don’t really think that AfD are Nazis, or you don’t consider Nazism to be all that bad.

As for the fact that AfD is financed by Putin, well, who isn’t? Have you heard of Gerhard Schröder? He is SPD. He was very openly and massively financed by Putin. Or take Angela Merkel. I don’t know if she received Russian payments or not, but a more viciously pro-Russian bitch you can’t dream to find.

So yes, absolutely AfD and Marine Le Pen and the Catalonian separatists are financed by Russia. And absolutely, the point is to divide and conquer. But whose fault is it that the good, intelligent, well-meaning people of Europe, who are, of course, a vast majority, aren’t managing to get their crap together?