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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
At some point it won’t anymore, but for many different reasons, they can’t see/don’t care.
First of all, as we mentioned, capitalism decays in to fascism, at which point (and why they actively working towards it) they will have even more power and less human rights to get in the way of the exploitation oppression and resource accumulation.
Then there’s also the fact that, being so far removed from the rest of society and being the ones who make the rules, they don’t feel like those should apply to them, not even rules of nature like “infinite growth is impossible in a finite world”.
This also means that their view of reality is so warped they think they’ll always be on top/secure. For example - they’re all spending millions even billions on bunkers, but never stop to consider who will serve and protect them in that bunker and why anyone would still be willing to (when things get bad enough, their money will be useless), as well as what world they might come out to if they do survive. Never mind stop what they’re doing to prevent the need for a bunker in the first place (to them, being equal to everyone else seems like a worse fate than global destruction).
The problem is that capitalism is a global cancer, and one fascist coming to their end doesn’t mean the system that got them there has been destroyed, or even “fixed” (you can see this in the failures to de-nazify Germany after the war, or to de-racist America after it’s founding, or de-monarchize? the UK for example), and that is why we say “workers of the world unite”, because it will take a global effort, not only in revolution, but in creating an equitable, just, and inclusive foundation for something better to be built on out of the void (this will require mass deprogramming and unlearning of the social structures imposed by the kyriarchy, and re-learning solidarity, compassion, community, cooperation, and so on - all things that actually come naturally to us, but are beaten out of us by life under capitalism).
And now I’ve lost my train of thought, and I’ve probably rambled on enough, so I’m going to leave it there lol