In Which Marco Rubio And JD Vance Lecture Germany To Be Nicer To Far Right Extremists
Saying the quiet part out loud, again.
Once upon a time, the Trump campaign spread rumors that Marco Rubio liked to go to gay foam dance parties in Miami, and Rubio talked about how Trump has small hands, wink wink, and “should be worrying about the lines around his eyes from the horrible spray tan.” But somehow now Marco Rubio, the saddest man in Washington, is now doing all of the jobs in the administration, or at least four of them. And he still found time to lecture Germany about democracy on Elon Musk’s hellsite, because this administration is in the dictionary under “chutzpah.”
Xitted Rubio:
Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise.
What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.
Germany should reverse course.
The German foreign office responded:
This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.
Yeah, they’ve got a good point, there. Maybe the US should do the same, but whoops, too late. And eesh, criticizing our allies on social media about how they run their democracies, that’s what American diplomacy has sunk to.
The background is that on Friday, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, BfV, labeled the entire far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as an “extremist endeavor.” Previously branches in three German states had been labeled as such, but now it’s the whole party, and the label gives the government expanded rights to observe AfD meetings, tap telephones and recruit informants, and state party funding can be withdrawn. It could even eventually be banned. The party is fighting that designation in court.
This has been brewing for a while; judges in Germany have twice found that the group was “suspected” extremist, and now in a 1,100-page report compiled by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the office has concluded:
The party's prevailing understanding of the people based on ethnicity and descent is incompatible with the free democratic basic order. It aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, subject them to unconstitutional discrimination, and thus assign them a legally devalued status. Specifically, for example, the AfD does not consider German citizens with a migration history from predominantly Muslim countries to be equal members of the German people, as defined ethnically by the party.
And that is against German law, specifically Section 130, which criminalizes incitement to hatred and insults that attack human dignity. The law has been around since 1871, and was amended after World War II to include anti-Semitism, and in 1994 to include Holocaust denial. And a provision was added in 2005 for “approving of, glorifying or justifying” Nazi rule.
We don’t know exactly what’s cited in the report, but here’s a sampling of some of the stuff AfD has been up to:
A party leader, Alice Weidel, has railed against “headscarf-wearing girls” and “knife-wielding men on welfare,” referring to Muslims.
Former party leader Alexander Gauland said Hitler and the Nazis are “just a speck of bird shit [Vogelschiss] in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”
Another former party leader, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper last year that members of the SS, you know, the guys who ran the Nazi concentration camps, were not criminals, necessarily: “I would never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.” That was too far-right for even France’s National Rally party, who said they wouldn’t sit alongside AfD in the European Parliament, and Krah stepped down. Notably, Krah’s former assistant was arrested last week, and accused of passing on sensitive information to China. Oh, and no one from the party has ever criticized Russia, ever, and Russia has spread disinformation in Germany critical of every party but them. Familiar!
And, party leaders have been rubbing shoulders with the greasy likes of JD Vance, Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, who appeared on a giant screen at an AfD rally days after that apparent Sieg-Heiling display to tell them that there’s been "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that."
The way-background, after World War II, is that the Allies, led by the US and President Dwight Eisenhower, forced Germany and Austria to undergo intensive anti-Nazification, and made the Germans pay for it. The goal, said Potsdam Conference papers, was “to remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public offices and from cultural and economic life of the German people.”
Millions of Germans were forced to fill out forms questioning their degree of Nazi-ness, and were barred from working until they did. Nazi and SS members were banned from office and from any jobs except menial labor, and about 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers were given jobs in America in Operation Paperclip.
Top-ranking Nazis were put on trial in Nuremberg, and Allied forces banned 30,000 books, destroyed textbooks, artworks, street signs, and all things Nazi. Eight million Germans, or 10 percent of the population, were members of the Nazi party, and about 45 million were members of Nazi-related organizations. From 1945 to 1950, the Allied powers detained hundreds of thousands of Germans in internment camps in the name of denazification, including 425,000 German prisoners in 700 secret camps throughout the United States, where they were shown anti-Nazi propaganda, including footage from concentration camps, and Herr Meets Hare.
So, it’s kind of ironic to have Secretary of State Bubbles lecturing Germany that they are now de-nazifying too hard. Also, isn’t the administration really worried about antisemitism? Just kidding, we all know that is just a flimsy excuse for the administration to try to take control of universities and crack down on protesters.
Anyway, Vice President Butthair joined in the chat too.
The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it.
The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt—not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.
Well, that’s not true. The Berlin Wall is still gone, and while the party has doubled its vote share between elections to around 20 percent, a poll over the weekend found 61 percent of Germans agreed with the categorization of the AfD as "confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor," and 48 percent support banning the party completely. And no other party in Germany will consider forming a coalition with it, because it is gross.
Remember how when Trump was running he would not shut up about wanting to pull out of NATO? Yet the administration seems to feel entitled to comment on how Germany conducts its internal affairs.
Funny how the only time they want to have anything to do with Europe, it’s to support the groups that benefit from the meddling of Russia. And how people like Bannon keep saying that Western European culture is the BEST CULTURE, yet they crap on Western Europeans and their actual culture any chance they get!
Free speech for me and not for thee, part one thousand!
PREVIOUSLY!
[Verfassungsschutz / DW ]
"powers to surveil the opposition"
Didn't these fucks just start digging into ActBlue?
Look, it's not the first time in history that an "America First" movement urged us to be nicer to German Far Right Extremists and how did THAT turn out?
{opens American History book}
Okay, never mind.