Counter rallies in Kaufbeuren show split between supporters of AfD and locals who acknowledge the Bavarian town’s Nazi past
Soaring church spires, the 1,000-year-old town centre unblemished by second world war bombing or graffiti, snow-capped Alps in the middle distance – Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, can count many blessings.
Unemployment is in the low single digits, the Luftwaffe backed away from plans to move its training school for Eurofighter and Tornado jet technicians elsewhere and crime is at a historic low.
However, as voters prepare to elect a new European parliament next month, deep-seated fears have gripped a significant share of the electorate in one of the most affluent pockets of Europe’s top economy and delivered it to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The bond between the party and its voters appears unshaken even by a cascade of recent scandals. The AfD’s lead candidate for the election, Maximilian Krah, was forced by his party leadership on Wednesday to resign from its board and stop campaigning after he told Italy’s La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force which ran the death camps, were not all criminals and could only be judged on the basis of “individual guilt”.
I mostly counter-steered here because of another pragmatism: The corrupt domestic powers that be in plenty of African states love to blame everything on colonialism, skirting responsibility for their own role in their country’s abject poverty. They’re the ones commanding the armies letting Wagner run around exploiting mineral resources and massacring people. And that isn’t even capitalism as such it’s plain ole feudalism.
The Ukrainian thing is not by culture or anything, it’s by “has a Ukrainian passport”. Which means you have a good educational standard because the basically one thing that the Soviets got right was education, and Ukraine kept that intact and even built on it.
I’m quite sure if those Ukrainian refugees were South Africans they’d get the same treatment, 95% literacy are nothing to scoff at.
Oh I don’t doubt that those in power are complicit in the exploitation (I disagree with calling it feudalism, however). Ridding themselves of responsibility by blaming colonialism sounds akin to Israel deflecting criticism by claiming anti-semitism.
The statist perspective is unable to properly address these inequalities and injustices because it cannot reject the hierarchical power structures that caused them in the first place. Foreign intervention is just colonialism 2.0, but the more “reactive” alternative is just leading to a situation where measuring immigrants by their worth as ‘skilled workers’ and ‘ease of integration’ is pragmatic. I’m not gonna deny that there’s a kind of sense to this, because that’s exactly what makes it so worrying. At least with the old racist pseudoscience we can point and laugh at how nonsensical it was.
I mean I can reject them all I want doesn’t mean that Wagner rolling tanks through my village wouldn’t upend the idealism quite quickly as I’m staring straight down hierarchy’s barrel. It sucks, yes, but there’s also shit all that could currently be done without breaking means-ends unity.
Which doesn’t mean that nothing at all can be done – but even the most hardcore anarchist will have to become a mere liberal in practice as making a pact with the devil might be the only way to fuck him over. To assuage your conscience, that goes both ways: Even the Pentagon has taken note of Rojava’s unparalleled capacity to stop those ISIS fucks in their tracks and they’d rather have the headache of yet another hundred anarchist (or at least anarchisty) places than the instability that the likes of ISIS bring. As they say a compromise is when both sides are unhappy. I’m sure that they’d be happier with more Rwandas (which is currently in the progress of becoming Africa’s Singapore) but the conditions that bring about authoritarian regimes which are neither corrupt nor power-mad are so fickle as to be impossible to bring about by design.