But if the mainstream, reasonable, middle-of-the-road, reality-based community doesn’t take cognizance of what ordinary people feel about the spread of Islam in their countries, they’ll find out what real extremism, bigotry, and racism are all about.
Take Saxony, for example. Saxony used to be part of the DDR when the Iron Curtain was still in place, and political diversity was suppressed back then. Nowadays people can choose their political parties, and their choices aren’t always what the rest of us would like.
According to Der Spiegel:
Social Democrats Behind Neo-Nazis in Saxony Survey- - - - - - - - -According to a voter survey in the eastern German state of Saxony, 9 percent of the population supports the neo-Nazi NPD with just 8 percent in favor of the Social Democrats. The NPD says it’s because the far-right party isn’t racist.
That Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) are in free fall is nothing new. The center-left party, despite being Angela Merkel’s coalition partner in Berlin, is overshadowed by the popularity of the chancellor. SPD leader Kurt Beck is unpopular and has a hard time even keeping his own party in line. And party membership is lower than it has been in half a century.
But on Thursday, the party hit a new low. A survey in the eastern German state of Saxony shows that, were voters to head to the polls on Sunday, more people in the state would mark the box next to the neo-Nazi party National Democratic Party (NPD) than would vote for the center-left SPD. The poll, carried out by Forsa, has 9 percent of those surveyed supporting the NPD with just 8 percent for the SPD.
The NPD celebrated the result in a press release, calling the numbers “really sensational.” The poll comes just three weeks after Saxony was in the news after a xenophobic mob chased eight Indians through the town of Mügeln shouting “Foreigners Out!” before beating them up. The NPD on Thursday said the most recent poll is a result of the fact “that we didn’t join the media-driven witch hunt against our own countrymen as happened in Mügeln.” The press release also said the coverage of the Mügeln attack was “racist” and ended with the words: “Don’t worry, the next elections are coming for sure.”
The NPD — Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands — is obviously a nationalist party. But to be a truly resurrected Nazi Party, it would have to be Socialist as well.
Readers who know German may want to browse through the NPD website and see what they think. Are these folks much the same as the Social Democrats, except that they want to expel the Jews and the Turks? Do they want a total welfare state, but only for real Germans?
I’d be interested to find out whether unabashed National Socialism is making a comeback.
The first time was tragedy. Do we get farce this time?
Hat tip: Radical Ron.
11 comments:
Hmmm ... this discussion has been had before regards the British BNP, and the NDP may not be the best example to argue but I wouldn't accept that being both national-patriotic and economically socialist automatically makes a Nationalsozialist.
That rather quite ignores the historical development of the NSDAP.
It also implies the only legitimate leftists are of the usual internationalist/marxist variety, and relects the ossification of the western political specturm into left/socialist-internationalist and right/capitalist-patriotic. Only now the west is developing a rash of capitalist-internationalist governments. How much real difference is there neocon Bush to New Labor Blair?
The NPD's history, association and less sensible policies make it rather a bad poster child, but the point remains - why should a leftist party not be national-patriotic? The constant screech of "fascist" has been a marxist political weapon for quite long enough.
I have no love for Nazis but I can't help but feel a little pleasure in seeing the left in such trouble.
Bullshit! The NPD outpolls the SPD in Saxony, but not the Socialists: The real Socialists, that is, the successor party to East-Germany's now-defunct SED now called PDS (or simply "the Left") score about 35%- (I didn't bother to look up the real number, but it's in the neighborhood).
Also, this is very likely not about foreigners (ca. 0.3% of the population in Saxony), or Moslems, or whatever, but about welfare and (un)employment. In the east of Germany, if you are somewhat left-leaning, you vote PDS (the real thing) and not the centrist and and only marginally socialist SPD. This is a long-established pattern in the east. West-Germans with leftish inclinations do the opposite. The PDS has zero base in the west, and is widely distrusted.
About the NPD: Forget them. They consist of a semi-senile leadership of Nazi-sentimentalists and a couple of footsoldiers of questionable abilities. Most of their parliament members can't form a coherent sentence - let alone a policy. The bulk of their voters are protest-voters (diffuse protest against about everything and nothing in particular) or rural youth with a third-reich sentimentality phase. They ususlly grow out of that.
The Mügeln PR-fiasco may have caused a short-term spike in their numbers (as they correctly observe, they were the only ones not to particpate in the self-hate feast that followed a minor violent bar brawl involving, among others, Indians) but it's not going to translate into a lasting success. They have no membership base, no leadership, no program, no money and no perspective. They are very unlike the BNP or the Flaams Belang.
Well, at one point they praise a woman who was dismissed from her television presenter post for, get this, saying that there was some good in the Third Reich - such as family values and so on.
Yep, the NPD are fascists, no question about it. They believe in the basic fascist idea of 'us all pulling together'. It is a crying shame that they are tarnishing the real german anti-jihadis.
Nazism is on the rise, for sure. Just look at Russia these days. Odd thing, the nation that helped conquer nazism is now home to more than half of the worlds skinheads and nazis.
Careful loco, when Stalin was threatened by Hitler he turned to nationalism and essentially became a fascist overnight, reviving the old Imperial ranks in the red army and loudly proclaiming the national ideal, where before he'd been an internationalist. Nazism and marxism were simply variations of the same thing. As an example; early in the war, when the USSR and Germany were still allies, there were defections from Germany to russia because nazi control of capital prevented any free markets opperating, whereas the soviet union pragmatically overlooked a certain amount of free market capitalism as long as it wasn't a threat to the state, because it kept the country functioning.
The thing is, there were defections from the soviet union to nazi germany for the exact same reason; mid-ranking soviets thought that the USSR wasn't marxist enough and saw a marxist ideal in Germany's absolute control of capital.
Apart from that the only substantial difference between the two was nationalism.
Nationalism by itself is not, of course, the problem. The problem is that it can be turned from love of the country in to hatred of anything that is outside or not of the nation. That's what Hitler did to Germany. It's what Stalin did to Russia and what Putin is doing right now. It's what the democrats are doing to the red states in the US, and what Mugabe did. All of these are expressions of fascism.
It could even be argued that it has a very subtle expression in the protectionism of the EU. The EU is moving toward a fascist state as the transfer of capital - any capital - is slowly brought under the heel of the government and the free market is slowly "harmonised" out of existence. They haven't got a nationalism to fall back on though, despite having created the trappings of statehood. It's a little ironic that this slow move toward a fascist union is provoking at least some of the rise of national socialist parties - nationalists who are using the threat of the EU against the national character as a crutch to pull themselves in to the public gaze. National socialists are not necessarily a problem unless they then start associating the EU with racial policies... which presents a problem, as in a lot of ways they will actually be arguing in a way that the majority agree with. The EU enforces significant amounts of legal and illegal immigration from third-world and islamic countries, which the local populations resent. Without support from the traditional parties they are starting to turn to other parties who might well lean towards a racial and fascist world view that would ultimately be very dangerous.
Hey folks, let's not forget something -- the Nazis are FAR LEFT. They are National SOCIALISTS. They are genocidal, big-government, totalitarians, just like Communists. It is not a difficult jump to go from Marxism to Fascim or Naziism. Many Nazis were former Communists. Mussolini was a former Communist. Putin and Milosevic, former Communists, turned to Fascism. Even one of the long time heads of the NDP, Horst Mahler, was former head of Baader-Meinhof.
It is an Orwellian feat of language, carried out by mostly Marxist academes and journalists, that magically put them on the far right, so as not to soil the left's "good name" (sic).
Yeah, that's always annoyed me. They go through all sorts of logical contortions to "prove" that Hitler wasn't really a socialist. He made the "mistake", in their eyes, of being a nationalist which is almost unforgivable for a socialist. The thing is, if you take his writings and slice out most of the more inflammatory rhetoric he sounds like hillary clinton or gordon brown.
That should scare people.
Archonix:
We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!
Adolf Hitler - May 1, 1927
As for Hitler, he was a complete disaster. Nobody has done more to abrogate European racial sovereignty than Hitler. I believe we (Europeans) are in the mess we are in today because of Hitler.
The left have used the 'nazi' boogey man as a blunt instrument to bludgeon Europeans into submission, literally.
The title should be "NDP Outpoll Socialists in Saxony" - otherwise it just sounds like leftist shrilling.
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