About 200,000 people have taken to the streets of Germany in further protests against the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Protests on Saturday also took place in Dresden, Mainz and Hanover in a sign of growing alarm at strong public support for AfD.
Roughly 150,000 people flocked to the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, where protesters gathered under the slogan “We are the Firewall” to protest against right-wing extremism and to show support for democracy.
Was one of them. Not in Berlin of course. Fuck that. But in my city they expected 700 people. We have been more than 5000.
Good shit! I hope those bastards felt exactly as unpopular as they should
Thanks for standing up to Nazis. It gives those of us who had family experience the horrors wrought by fascists in WW2 hope that Germans haven’t been won over again by the same poisonous ideas.
Meanwhile in america…
Almost all Germans have bad family experiences from that time as well.
Either you lost someone due to Nazi terror, or you lost someone who was being a Nazi.
I expect neither is an experience that anyone would cherish to relive.
In places that were invaded, resistance were thrown from the top of buildings after they were interrogated, their bodies were left there to be collected by whoever dared. At night all you could hear were their screams while they were being tortured in cellars by the Gestapo. Dissidents were hanged from lampposts in the main street and left as warnings. The concentration camps were often in the middle of the town, not placed at a distance to avoid offending the locals.
And the next generation in those places grew up right next to those concentration camps and mass graves. They were raised by physically and psychologically scarred people, in places that were not funded by the Marshall Plan reconstruction funds that even West Germany received. Decades later there was still rubble and half destroyed buildings.
I appreciate there is much trauma involved in losing any family, friends or community members to war, or to experiencing the bombs being dropped around you. But, I think the level of cruelty and fear experienced by invaded regions was next level. And I don’t think Germans generally understand the details of what life was like for the places that were occupied - but that is only my suspicion. I can’t understand how else the AfD could discuss deportations or receive such a huge proportion of the vote.
Neither Axis aligned country tesidents nor the invaded would cherish reliving it, but they have had and continue to have very very different experiences as a consequence of the war.
If my post came across as a comparison, it was not meant to. Of course the average scale and intensity would be higher in occupied territories.
I just wanted to highlight that a vast majority of Germans have both the knowledge of the terror their ancestors committed due to the schools’ focus on keeping every new generation well educated on it, while combining it with the traumas their own family or communities experienced.
This combines into a fairly strong anti fascist society.
Yes, we have neo nazis and all other flavors of right wing extremists, but they have much less real power than some international media reporting might make you think. Exactly because the majority of society is sensitive to this and does rise against it in numbers.
Even before the current wave, there never was a right wing demonstration or rally that wasn’t accompanied by a liberal counter rally with at least a hundred times their number. And even then those weren’t left wing extremists or other political radicals in the majority. Most of these types of rallies have a large number of very boring participants, people that are close to apolitical otherwise.
Regarding AfD: remember it’s not an openly fascist party, unlike the previously existing NPD, which is now forbidden. AfD claims to be a neo conservative party, a bit further right than the big CDU ( which is center-right). And the AfD keeps dancing on this line, in some areas actively pushing out people as soon as their fascist activities become known and turning themselves, while simultaneously following a slightly tamer route. It’s a dangerous and effective way of moving the goal posts of public discourse, especially with no other party effectively engaging their topics. The AfD group revraled to participate in the current nasty discussions is not even a hundred people. I’m confident you’ll find a couple dozen idiots of their scale in every larger city of this world.
But every time they slip up like this in Germany, they experience massive setbacks.
It’s still important to recognize their danger and work against them, but Germany is far from lost to their twisted ideology. But media does like to be sensationalistic, even when it has good intentions.
A US comparison might be how the tea party developed as an offspring of the Republicans, and how they subsequently shifted the entire political landscape, despite them actually only bring a rather small group. So many unthinkable policies that nobody would have even considered worth a discussion are now on the table for actual legislative processes.
Yeah also went to a protest in my town. 500 expected, the newspaper said around 3500 attendees. That’s like 7-8% of the population on a Friday afternoon where lots of people were still working. So many good signs :D
Your phrasing makes it look like you say “I was also demonstrating but of course not in Berlin, fuck Berlin”, I guess you meant something else?
It is really inspiring that so many Germans are coming out to make their voices heard like this. It’s easy to tell a pollster you don’t like Nazis; but coming out on the streets week-after-week in the middle of winter like they’ve been doing recently shows commitment.
Gut. Freiheit, Gleichheit, Geschwisterlichkeit. Der Rechsextremus muss scheitern.
Thats the French one.
German is Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit, found in the national hymn, on old German mark coins and now German minted euro coins.
Translates to Unity, (rule of) Law and freedom.
Recht also simply means justice, literally “what is right”. And Einigkeit tends more towards concord or consensus than pure unity which can have overtones of uniformity, that’s a different word in German (Einheitlichkeit). Freiheit means what it means.
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Yeah I’m not as familiar with German anarchic slogans as I am with French and Spanish (married a mutualist and am a syndicalist), but good to know this
Rech-sex-tremus.
Deutsch is hard.
Yeah it’s a real bitch going from English to a language where the spelling makes more sense but the words are long enough to trip you up
fyi, not a bad try, you got about 2/3 of the word. Rechtsextremismus would be the correct spelling.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Protests on Saturday also took place in Dresden, Mainz and Hanover in a sign of growing alarm at strong public support for AfD.
The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, wrote on X: “Whether in Eisenach, Homburg or Berlin: in small and large cities across the country, many citizens are coming together to demonstrate against forgetting, against hatred and hate speech.”
Jakob Springfeld, who speaks for the NGO Solidarity Network Saxony, said he was shocked that it had taken such a long time for mass demonstrations against the far right, given the AfD had been successful in many smaller communities already.
Earlier this week, a Forsa poll showed that backing for AfD had dropped below 20% for the first time since July, with voters citing countrywide demonstrations against the far right as the most important issue.
The protests, which are now in their fourth week, followed a report last month that two senior AfD members had attended a meeting to discuss plans for the mass deportation of citizens of foreign origin.
AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told broadcaster Deutschlanfunk that while it was “legitimate to take to the streets”, protesters should not allow themselves to be used to distract parties from the country’s actual problems.
The original article contains 380 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
My country * could take a lesson (even on protesting, in general).
This is very nice. In the meantime the German government cut funding for the UN humanitarian aid organization, with the predictable outcome that many thousands of civilizations are going to starve or thirst to death or die from diseases. Because Israel said so after the ICJ ruling.
This in contravention of the ICJ ruling that ordered to stop Genocide. Which is binding for all countries to take steps to prevent genocide. German press isn’t really reporting on what that means.
Which means the current “social democratic / green / liberal” coalition is potentially aiding in a genocide.
Fuck the AfD fascists but you know… fuuuuuuuuuuuck
with the predictable outcome that many thousands of civilizations are going to starve or thirst to death or die from diseases.
UNWRA currently isn’t able to get aid in because the IDF blocks everything so right now is actually the about best time to put pressure on them to clean ship. Not to mention that there’s other agencies and organisations in the area doing generic humanitarian work, schools are about the last of Gazan’s worries right now.
This in contravention of the ICJ ruling that ordered to stop Genocide.
The ICJ said no such thing. The preliminary order requires Israel to make sure that aid is getting to Gazans.
The ICJ said no such thing. The preliminary order requires Israel to make sure that aid is getting to Gazans.
Thanks, but I have read the order I don’t need a random secondary source to know what’s in there or not. Paragraph 80.
I mean even on the face of it: It’s Israel which is getting sued, not the rest of the world. Of course the ICJ is thus going to order Israel to do stuff, not the rest of the world, which isn’t in the dock.
The court determined that there is risk of genocide, so the world community MUST act. Instead they cut of funding for humanitarian aid, which is in direct contravention of international law.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml
- The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner …
That’s not a court order. It’s not even a treaty. It’s a summit paper summing up how the participants understand applicable international law. The summit was 2005. Israel already did shady shit back then but SA hadn’t yet brought a case before the ICJ, mostly because Israeli politicans hadn’t yet run their mouth regarding the seed of Amalek and stuff which enabled dragging Israel before court in the first place as the charge of genocide requires intent to destroy, not mere war crimes, those kinds of quotes are necessary to prove intent.
Learn to actually read and contextualise the stuff you’re quoting. I don’t disagree with the sentiment but boy are your posts full of holes. Hasbara would have you for breakfast.
Well then listen to the interview with the actual lawyer I linked
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