Germany has recently taken a chilling new step, signalling its willingness to use political views as grounds to curb migration. Authorities are now moving to deport foreign nationals for participating in pro-Palestine actions. As I reported this week in the Intercept, four people in Berlin – three EU citizens and one US citizen – are set to be deported over their involvement in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. None of the four have been convicted of a crime, and yet the authorities are seeking to simply throw them out of the country.
The accusations against them include aggravated breach of the peace and obstruction of a police arrest. Reports from last year suggest that one of the actions they were alleged to have been involved in included breaking into a university building and threatening people with objects that could have been used as potential weapons.
But the deportation orders go further. They cite a broader list of alleged behaviours: chanting slogans such as “Free Gaza” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, joining road blockades (a tactic frequently used by climate activists), and calling a police officer a “fascist”. Read closely, the real charge appears to be something more basic: protest itself.
Germans never stopped being nazis. They just laid low until they found a new acceptable target.
Much of the mentality that enabled nazi Germany stayed. I’m half romanian, half german. I’m also part jewish. My ancestors died in the Holocaust. The German love for law and order scares me. They’re overly obedient. Rarely walk out of line on serious matters. Mark my words, but someday the AfD will come to power, and they’ll make use of all the tools the liberals implemented for them (suppressing protests, deporting people, cutting funding, and so on) and no one will bat an eye. Because a law is a law and therefore it is to be followed. Hopefully I’ll manage to be far away by that time.
What mentality do you mean? The obedience? I feel like it’s more nuanced than that. Yes, following the rules everyone agreed on is lived in a rather inflexible way. If you think about it though, that’s democracy. It’s a commitment to the compromise. The unwritten contract between the majority and the minority. We recognize that the moment you start thinking “I don’t like this law, so I won’t follow it”, democracy falls apart. People here want law and order even for laws they disagree with, because collectively that means that laws they agree with will also be followed by everyone.
There are limits though. While I agree that it’s scary to see the AFD become more and more popular, I disagree with your prediction. The idea of “never again” regarding the Holocaust guides every single part of public life. There are not many Germans who would say they are proud of their country. Only every two years, when Germany plays soccer in the international leagues, flying a German flag does not feel weird. Shame for your own country. That’s what Germans think everyone expects us to feel.
Strong military? We’re watching you. Your Great-Grandfather did what? Be sorry. Proud of Germany? How dare you.
The very first words of our constitution (“Human dignity is untouchable.”) are a testament to the Holocaust. It’s an incredibly well chosen sentence that every single law is measured against. We know the entire world expects us to uphold this principle forever.
I am not arguing against the danger for democracy that the AFD poses. It’s very real. But in Germany we even have a law to actually make parties illegal that are against the constitution, most importantly the first sentence of it.
So, if Germans are obedient to the law, and the most important principle of our law makes anything even close to the Holocaust illegal, isn’t obedience a good thing then? The real question is, would Germans decide to just accept unconstitutional laws, or rather insist on upholding the constitution? I think the huge protests in the past months have made clear that many people are already standing up for the constitution. Not because they just follow rules blindly, but because they actually believe in the principles of compromise, democracy and dignity.
I would say that’s a veneer of paternalism on top of a foundation of democracy.
The people’s vote is never precise. It gives broad direction to those who govern. Politicians are trusted representatives of the people to act in their best interest, but they’re not told precisely what to legislate on (unless you’re Swiss and live in a direct democracy). They can inact things which are inline with the people’s wishes, and they can get it wrong.
If the people behave as is the legislators are always right because they were placed there through a democratic process and there is never any push back, then they’ve surrendered a large part of their agency. If the people just obey rules without question, their government is now their fixed term authority figures. The government knows what is right, and the people should just follow along.
Talk to a Frenchman and he will be very clear that government serves the people. Not the other way around, and that sometimes you have to break the rules to remind those in government who is in charge. Bastille day is celebrated to make sure no one forgets.
I think Germany has the wrong mindset on this point.
Edit: I also think that “Never again” has become “Never again shall we see the Jewish persecuted” rather than “Never again shall we allow a holocaust to befall anyone”. If Germany has truly learnt the lesson they should recognise that any country can perform evil. Even those that have been wronged in the past.
NeVer AgAin, said the people funding a genocide as we speak
I’m sorry, but I used to think exactly like you many years ago.
Most German remembrance culture is overly superficial. Many German politicians hold straight up nazi views and they’re still mingling around in the Bundestag. Some of them were caught on audio saying nazi shit. Others were involved with nazi organisations as youngsters. Many of them still attend “secret” nazi meetings and they’re still mingling around with other politicians, even when it gets out to the press. Many of them hold up antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. views and they’re still in positions of power. Most german billionaires have built their empires on top of the Holocaust. They’re still around. No one dares to touch them. There’s just some superficial “public outrage” from time to time and then the wheels of history just keep chugging on. Where’s the remembrance culture for the millions of victims, most jewish, many queer, and political victims of the nazi regime?
Where was the remembrance culture for so many decades for the tens of thousands of queer victims of the Holocaust? Germany barely managed to pass a same-sex marriage bill a few years ago. Hell, even the US has done it before Germany did and they didn’t have any concentration camps filled with homosexuals. So where’s the remembrance culture?
Where’s the human dignity when the greens and the social democrats are deporting people to Afghanistan, a country ruled by the taliban? Where’s the human dignity when minorities are often the ones to get the short end of the stick at every interaction with state institutions? Where’s the human dignity when minorities die in police custody and nothing ever comes out of it? Or when cops are involved en masse with nazi organisations? Where’s the human dignity when people go out to protest and they get massively suppressed by police, often with liberal newspapers cheering it on?
It doesn’t need to get to an industrialised killing of a group of people to be able to talk about “nazi like mentality”.
Germany is more than happy to revoke citizenships nowadays for saying things the German state doesn’t like. This is something unseen since nazi times. This is creating first and second class German citizens. Are you a so-called “bio deutsche”? Then you’re free to do nazi shit, scream your hate-speech at immigrants, you’ll mostly just get a fine and that’s the end of the story. Are you a german with a second citizenship? Then go against the so called Staatsräson, criticise Israel publicly, and you’ll have the entire might of the German state weighing down on you, having your citizenship revoked and ending up being deported. For a thought crime.
You either stay in line, or you’re out of here, unworthy of being a citizen of this state just because you hold a different opinion.
And the thing about making parties illegal. That’s hilarious. The AfD is saying shit nowadays that other parties ten/twenty years ago have gotten banned for. And they’re doing it openly. And growing bolder, while the german society just stands there and looks.
Where is the human dignity when Germany makes a shitton of money by selling weapons that end up being used on fucking kids in Gaza? Where was the human dignity when Germany sold Saddam Hussein all the infrastructure he needed to build chemical weapons? Where was the love for law when the German chancellor ruled out an arrest for Netanyahu even though he has an international warrant?
When you answer all of those questions, then you’ll know exactly how much Germany, as a state, cares about its own constitution. And yet the german people still follow the state’s line. And that’s all you need to know for the future.
I don’t think we disagree on these points. I’ll reply to more of your arguments once I have the time, but for now the main question I was asking myself was: How can we at the same time do our duty to Isreal as remembrance of the Holocaust, and actively oppose what Israel does right now? We would have to cross the line, and actually say things that everyone says we shouldn’t because of our history. My personal view is that our debts are paid, and we should go back to just rationally follow international law again. But it’s not an easy situation for our politicians, because most of the world still expects us to essentially not do that. What do you think could be the solution? In my opinion, essentially Germany has to emancipate it from its “Urschuld”
It’s amazing what articulating your thoughts properly does for the votes. Maybe OP could learn a thing or two.
Nazis were installed in East and West Germany
Nazis were kept at industrial managers for West/East Germany
Nazis that weren’t punished got hired via Operation Paperclip and Operation Osoaviakhim, scottfree from the mass murder.
Nazis that escaped to Argentina eventually got influence there and back home.
I know hindsight is 20/20 but we should have arrested every single one of them until they died from old age, and let their graves be a monument to their atrocities and a public bathroom.
Careful, your ignorance is leaking.
Explain to me how deporting people for protesting against genocide is a thing decent people do.
They are not innocent protesters: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article255845278/Wegen-Stuermung-von-Uni-Gebaeude-Erstmals-Exempel-statuiert-Berlin-plant-Ausweisung-auslaendischer-Israel-Hasser.html
It wasn’t just protesting though. It’s hard to get details and it might very well be that Berlin “over reacted”, so I’ll be looking forward to see what the courts decide, the 4 already have sued against the order to leave.
I was responding to your original premise, that “Germans never stopped being Nazis” - and you know it. Don’t try to feign outrage at being called out for condemning an entire country’s people (“Germans”) for the actions of a few (The Berlin Senate Administration.)
Do better, and perhaps people will earnestly engage with you for the better instead of just getting upset with you.
Germany exported 3 billions of euros of weapon to Israel in the last 20 years. It’s war profiteering
Pretty Nazi if you ask me
Germany’s post-World War II government was riddled with former Nazis
For a more than 20 years fter World War II, nearly 100 former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party held high-ranking positions in the West German Justice Ministry, according to a German government report.
From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.
Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.
…
The prevalence of former Nazi officials in the ministry allowed them to shield one another from post-war justice and to carry over some Nazi policies, like discrimination against gays, into the West German government.
One lawyer who helped craft discriminatory laws barring marriages between Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi regime held a top family-law position in the post-World War II Justice Ministry, according to The Local.
“The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister who presented the report Monday, according to AFP.
The infiltration of the post-war West German government by former Nazis was not limited to the Justice Ministry. A report released late last year found that between 1949 and 1970, 54% of Interior Ministry staffers were former Nazi Party members, and that 8% of them had served in the Nazi Interior Ministry, which at one point was run by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
Surprise?
I mean, who else would have been able to run the government, when most people with the required skills were also associated with the Former system.
Americans deliberately counted on the expertise of former Nazis. Thats not news and actually not very shocking.
And discrimination against gays was more of a Zeitgeist thing. E.g. Being gay was a Crime in france until 1982.
Holocaust survivors and refugees, for starters. Germany was fully occupied by the US and USSR, so all the big decisions were going through DC/Moscow anyway. Turning the government over to survivors and any resisters you could find would have made far more sense than simply handing the country back to the Fascists.
I agree from a moral standpoint but from the perspective of efficient rebuilding I disagree.
Why would you want to efficiently rebuild the Third Reich?
Is your premise that people cannot see the errors of their ways and therefore cannot change? Or are you presenting facts in an attempt to imply that all this time there’s been a shadow Nazi government? Or…? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but during the war years, everyone had to be a member of the Nazi party. All youth groups that weren’t official Nazi organizations were banned.
In the years between WWII and German reunification, there was an active effort to stamp out Nazi ideals in the West. Children learned in graphic detail what atrocities were committed, and many of them took those learnings to heart. To this day, spending on military in Germany, surveillance by the state, are fraught topics. German politics couldn’t be further from a 1 or 2 party system.
What was informs but doesn’t dictate what is. I have spent a lot of time in Germany, and I’m certain that in spite of the rise of AfD, Germany is the European country furthest from Nazi ideals.
Not when they are immersed in a roiling pot of fascist propaganda, no. You can’t see error when you are surrounded by media justifying your decisions. You can’t find the will to change when you’ve been told again and again that circumstances are beyond your control.
Right now, German media is as bad as anything the MAGA Americans are churning out, with migrant hysteria and xenophobia hitting a fevered pitch. Combined with the energy crisis in Europe and the economic downturn globally, it’s a recipe for a new wave of Fascist dictatorship that Germans as rapidly buying into once again.
The fact that it hasn’t even been a century and they’re already reverting is proof enough for me that they didn’t change.
Yeah as an american I absolutely can’t relate to the experience of people blaming an entire country for the actions of their government. Especially by europeans who always act like they’re better than us despite starting two world wars, the slave trade, and currently falling back into fascism, which they invented by the way. That could never possibly happen and I apologize for acting in retaliation for these actions which have not happened.
deleted by creator