Nazi-Uprising in Present Day Germany - Page 11

When I first visited Berlin several years ago, I stood under the Brandenburger Tor, with a plaque detailing the glorious events of March 1848, supposed to remind us of the best political traditions of Germany's ancestors, in contrast to 1870 and 1933. The plaque commemorated Germany's first liberal-democrats, how they rose up for their rights against an authoritarian regime, how they for a wrinkle in time seized the destiny of the nation and seemed to propel it to a hopeful future.

This is the kind of dogma, half naive, half ridiculous, which is being commonly propagated as "History" in Germany today, in classrooms, media and the popular imagination. The National Assembly which assembled in Frankfurt in 1848 eventually perished under the duress of its own national radicalism, and was forced to prostitute itself out to Frederick William IV, who wound up protecting his "democrats" from the people, but rightly refused to pick his crown up from the gutter. No one today will teach 1848 as an object lesson in the failures of historical German liberalism and constitutionalism, an episode whose multifaceted complexities, by the way, would have been more profoundly understood under the classical curricula of such authoritarian regimes as Bismarck's Prussia or Hitler's National Socialist Germany than by the historically tone-deaf people of today.

It is being trumpeted as a milestone event in the progress of Germany because national curriculum of self-censorship has practically eradicated all other political achievements from German memory. It has painted the sweep of Germany with a broad brush and, while subscribing to the Sonderweg theory that all of Germany's history must be read under the dim shadow of the Third Reich, occasionally pretends to promote Germany's Western legacy by citing and mis-citing such episodes as the March Revolution or Operation Walküre. This kind of post ex-facto ideological manipulation exists all over the place. The German Biedermeier is more properly the teleological Vormärz, the War Credits vote of the SPD in 1914 is now seen as an departure from political norms in German history, rather than its conformity to it.

This is all perhaps only ephemerally relevant to the issue at hand. Looking at the OP, however, and reading the report by the Friederich-Ebert-Stiftung, it's obvious that some things are being misrepresented. In the Spiegel-polls, the NDP does not command enough support to enter any State parliament in Germany apart from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the polls show them at 6%.
The Survey of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung has a list of questions so leading, that sometimes an answer which reveals a discerning historical understanding will be registered ideologically as “Rechtsextrem”


i.e.

Question 1:



Quite apart from the fact that this question betrays a lack of understanding as to what Dictatorship is, a classical scholar who admires Sulla might agree to this statement, and be labelled an extremist. The leading clause is the stipulation “unter bestimmten Umständen,” which vastly inflates the number of people who will be labelled inaccurately.

Question 2:



The leading aspect of this question is raised by its very hypothetical nature. You might as well ask if Hitler behaved as Mother Theresa, would he be seen as a saint today? The question is deliberately drawing on the great Hitler-biographer Joachim Fest's assertion in the introduction of his 1974 biography: Shall we call him great?

Fest asserted in his biograhpy that had Hitler died in 1938, he would have gone down in history as the greatest of German statesmen, surpassing Bismarck. These are debatable, but not trivial postulations. Yet under the consideration of the F-E-Stiftung, a lifelong bourgeois conservative like Fest would have been labelled an extremist.

The list goes on and on, deducing folly from folly. Finally all this “information” is reduced to a number ready for publication. After a long, exhaustive, methodological study, the final results conclude that the percentage of people holding extreme-right attitudes in Germany have grown from 6.6 percent to 15.8 percent. People are shocked. New resolutions are made from the left to accelerate the social and mental terraforming of the nation. We have to make German history even more mendacious and crude. We have to educate people better. We have to address socio-economic inequality.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have a better thermometer of measuring the presence of extremism in modern life. I go on the internet and see which people are going into a crazed frenzy calling everything else extreme.