AfD surge in German regional elections
The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has created further panic within the German political establishment after historic regional election results in two eastern German states.
In Thuringia, AfD became the largest party with 32.8% and 32 seats (up from 23.4% and 22 seats five years ago). In Saxony, they finished only just behind the conservative CDU after advancing from 27.5% to 30.6% and from 38 to 40 seats.
Politics in eastern Germany is even more fragmented than previously, with many voters alienated from the Federal Republic’s mainstream parties. For many years, large numbers of Saxon and Thuringian voters backed the modern version of the old Communist Party, rebranded as the Left Party (Die Linke), and until about a decade ago the old German nationalist party NPD also polled well.
The NPD won seats in Saxony’s regional parliament in the 2004 and 2009 elections, but its decline was accelerated by the emergence of AfD. Last year the NPD renamed itself Heimat (Homeland) but has yet to revive, and had no candidates in either Saxony or Thuringia this year.
As we have previously reported, many radical nationalists abandoned NPD for the new party III. Weg (Third Way), which did not contest Saxony or Thuringia yesterday but after several years of growth will be contesting the Brandenburg regional elections later this month.
AfD began as a right-wing conservative party with quasi-Thatcherite policies, but began to take a stronger line against immigration after former Chancellor Angela Merkel shocked her countrymen by admitting a mass influx of refugees in 2015.
Paradoxically, Thuringia (which saw the greatest AfD success yesterday) hasn’t seen much immigration. Its population has declined markedly since German reunification, from 2.7 million to 2.1 million, and outside major cities its population is noticeably ageing.
This feeling of being abandoned and exploited by the federal political elite is a major factor in the success of both AfD and a new leftwing party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, the half-Iranian former leader of the pro-Moscow faction who broke away from Die Linke to form her own party BSW.
In Thuringia BSW polled 15.8% and took 15 seats, while in Saxony they were similarly in third place with 11.8% and 15 seats.
In theory AfD and BSW combined would now have a majority in the Thuringian Parliament, but although they agree on some foreign and defence policies, the state government has no power in these areas, and in most domestic policy areas the two parties are enemies: no such coalition is on the cards.
From a racial nationalist perspective, yesterday’s results are in some ways welcome news. But we should have few illusions about AfD, which is essentially another civic nationalist system party, and some of whose leaders have corrupt links to Moscow.
The most positive aspect of all this is that Germany (like France) is moving towards irreconcilable political divisions. AfD are not the answer: but they are posing questions that can cripple Germany’s ‘democratic’ constitution, and lay the foundations for better movements in the future.
In the short term, the challenge for the establishment parties is to find some way of patching together minority governments that exclude both AfD and BSW, though it’s possible that the CDU will demonstrate their lack of principle by seeking some sort of arrangement with Wagenknecht.
(Germany’s federal constitution divides power between the central government in Berlin and various states or Länder, in a somewhat similar manner to the USA. Thuringia has a population of 2.1 million, similar to the US state of New Mexico, or slightly smaller than West Yorkshire. Saxony’s population is just over 4 million, similar to Oklahoma, or slightly less than half the size of Greater London. The Saxon capital is Dresden, the historic city devastated by Allied terror bombing in February 1945.)
Censorship and the ‘greatest treason’
[This article is also available in Spanish / al español, and in German / auf deutsch.]
“The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.“
When T.S. Eliot wrote these lines in Murder in the Cathedral, he was thinking of the temptations of intellectual vanity and self-aggrandisement that potentially soil the motivation even of a religious martyr.
Eliot’s reflections on Archbishop Thomas Becket are worth thinking about, for anyone aspiring to political leadership – especially in a dissident cause such as racial nationalism – but today those lines came into my mind for other reasons, grounded in the grim state of 21st century European politics rather than 20th century poetry or mediaeval history.
Last week the German magazine Compact was banned by the Federal Republic’s interior minister, who cited alleged incitement of racial hatred (and all the usual ‘anti-woke crimes’) by the journal and its editor Jürgen Elsässer.
Yet, as has been pointed out by our friends at Dritte Weg (which is one of the very few genuine German nationalist organisations and remains untainted by the cowardice and treachery that pervades the ‘patriotic’ scene), this latest ban is more complicated than it seems.
To be clear: Compact and Jürgen Elsässer (unlike Dritte Weg) are not real nationalists or even real patriots. The magazine has built a large readership on the basis of American-style conspiracy theory and shallow posturing on quasi-nationalist themes. Until recently – unlike most of the nationalist scene in Germany – Compact had been unmolested by the authorities, lavishly funded, and widely distributed.
The most striking feature of Compact was/is its slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin. Under the guise of calls for ‘peace’, it has persistently peddled Kremlin propaganda. Of course in every nation there have always been genuine pacifists, whose stance must in some ways be respected even if one disagrees with them. But that isn’t where Elsässer and Compact are coming from. Nor are they rooted in any form of nationalist tradition.
Elsässer began his political life as a dedicated follower of communism and a proponent of the Moscow line, as it was during the 1970s and 1980s: anti-nazi, anti-racist, etc. During the 1990s he was among the founders of what (believe it or not) was proudly termed the ‘anti-German’ movement. This particular leftist faction argued that Germany had an inherent historical tendency towards ‘nazi’-style crimes, and therefore that Germany should never again be allowed to have a viable military or play any serious role in international affairs.
Elsässer’s ‘anti-German’ movement became notorious for turning up at commemorations of the 1945 Dresden terror bombing and chanting: “Bomber Harris, do it again!” For them, Germany couldn’t be punished severely enough, and however weak Germany became, it deserved to be degraded still further.
But – very significantly – this ‘anti-German’ tendency also took the form of opposing German participation in military operations in the former Yugoslavia. In retrospect (whatever else we might think about the Yugoslav civil war of that era) we can see the continuity: the likes of Elsässer consistently took the Kremlin line, whether during the dying decades of the Soviet Union, the corrupt Yeltsin era, or the neo-Stalinist Putin era.
It didn’t matter whether this line was ‘anti-nazi’, pro-Serb, or anti-Ukrainian: if it was the Kremlin line, it was faithfully followed by Elsässer’s gang.
During the 2000s, recognising the damage that had been inflicted on the credibility of the West (even internally) by the Iraq War, Putin’s intelligence service began to capitalise on ill-focused dissidence and conspiracy theorising among an audience of credulous online readers that was replacing traditional categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’.
Between 2009-2011, this Moscow line infiltrated the ‘right wing’ scene in Germany via (for example) two expensively produced magazines. Zuerst! had roots in genuine nationalist movements, but from 2011 it was edited by a Kremlin agent, Manuel Ochsenreiter. With financial backing from his Moscow masters (including the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev), Ochsenreiter travelled widely (especially in the Middle East) and networked with other nationalists – he was well-known for example to H&D‘s assistant editor and to our late comrade Richard Edmonds, and he worked in the European parliamentary office of an AfD politician.
Long suspected of being a Russian agent, Ochsenreiter’s career ended in 2019 when two Polish ‘far right’ activists whom he had commissioned to carry out a terrorist attack in the Ukrainian border city of Uzhhorod, were caught red-handed and confessed.
Though his lawyer issued the usual feeble denials, Ochsenreiter knew the game was up. Facing terrorist charges, he fled to Moscow and sought his masters’ protection. Now an embarrassment to Putin, Ochsenreiter died from a convenient heart attack in a Moscow hospital, aged 45. (The fact that the mainstream media, including the BBC, has occasionally reported the truth about Ochsenreiter and his fellow Russian agents doesn’t make it any less true! Shamefully, the mainstream media has told more truth about Putin than has most of the ‘alternative’ media: a sad symptom of our movement’s sickness.)
Zuerst! continues to peddle Moscow’s lies, but Compact (launched around the same time and with a less umbilical connection to the nationalist scene) became a far more influential Putinist mouthpiece. Until February this year, when certain outlets began refusing to stock it, Compact was widely available at mainstream news kiosks on the streets and railway stations of German towns and cities.
Naturally enough, Elsässer’s magazine latched onto every fashionable theme linked to the broadly defined dissident right, from anti-Islam movements such as PEGIDA to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown demos, though without promoting anything that could be described as a coherent nationalist ideology (which is unsurprising given Elsässer’s own roots on the communist left).
Yet, as our friends at Dritte Weg have pointed out, the federal republic’s interior ministry does not seem to have relied on the treacherous Putinism of Elsässer and Compact as a basis for their banning.
Instead, the minister Nancy Faeser prattled on about ‘racism’ and ‘anti-semitism’ – all the usual ‘crimes’ against wokeness. She specifically stated that the authorities “would not allow ethnic definitions to be used to define who belongs to Germany and who does not.”
The message is clear – ethno-nationalism itself is to be criminalised, in fact made unconstitutional. (The irony being that Compact is not in any serious sense ethno-nationalist!)
In this respect, the action against Compact is an action against all of us, although the federal republic has a record of attempting such bans but then failing in the courts, and the same might happen this time.
Does this mean we should all be rallying around, despite clear and obvious political differences, and defending Compact against censorship?
No: there are two good reasons why we should oppose censorship, but also distance ourselves from Compact.
Firstly, there is no point making all the sacrifices and taking all the risks involved in nationalist political life if we are prepared to sacrifice our principles and ignore clear ideological dividing lines. Our enemy’s enemy is not necessarily our friend – which is why European racial nationalists didn’t march in support of ‘anti-Zionist’ Al-Qaeda or IS sympathisers when they were carted off to Guantanamo. The same applies to Putinists now, as applied to IS then: they are our enemy, whether or not they are also to any genuine extent our enemy’s enemy.
Secondly, as the case of Manuel Ochsenreiter demonstrates, if we allow our cause to be tainted by blatant treason, we are handing our rulers a stick to beat us with. Perhaps, as the collapse of the multiracial experiment becomes ever more obvious, the state will find some excuse to intern us.
But let’s not make it easy for them by associating our cause with the indefensible. Let’s not allow our cause to be dragged into the Putinist gutter.
European nationalists should stand against censorship; we should stand in support of our comrades’ right to free expression; but we should not endorse the anti-nationalist, anti-European traitors Jürgen Elsässer and Compact magazine.
Zensur und der „größte Verrat“
[Dieser Artikel ist auch im englischen Original und in einer spanischen Übersetzung verfügbar.]
“Die letzte Versuchung ist der größte Verrat, aus falschem Grund zu tun die rechte Tat.”
Als T.S. Eliot diese Zeilen in Mord im Dom schrieb, dachte er an die Versuchungen intellektueller Eitelkeit und Selbstverherrlichung, die selbst die Motivation eines religiösen Märtyrers beschmutzen können.
Eliots Betrachtungen über Erzbischof Thomas Becket sind für jeden, der eine politische Führungsrolle anstrebt – insbesondere in einem oppositionellen Bereich wie dem Rassennationalismus –, eine Überlegung wert. Heute jedoch kamen mir diese Zeilen aus anderen Gründen in den Sinn, die eher im düsteren Zustand der europäischen Politik des 21. Jahrhunderts wurzeln als in der Poesie des 20. Jahrhunderts oder der mittelalterlichen Geschichte.
Letzte Woche wurde das deutsche Magazin Compact vom Bundesinnenminister verboten, der der Zeitschrift und ihrem Herausgeber Jürgen Elsässer angebliche Anstiftung zum Rassenhass (und alle üblichen „Anti-Woke-Verbrechen“) vorwarf.
Aber wie unsere Freunde vom Dritten Weg (eine der ganz wenigen echten deutschen nationalistischen Organisationen, die von der Feigheit und dem Verrat, die die „patriotische“ Szene durchdringen, verschont geblieben sind) bereits betont haben, ist dieses jüngste Verbot komplizierter, als es scheint.
Um es klar zu sagen: Compact und Jürgen Elsässer (anders als der Dritte Weg) sind keine echten Nationalisten oder gar echte Patrioten. Das Magazin hat sich auf der Grundlage amerikanischer Verschwörungstheorien und oberflächlicher Haltung zu quasi-nationalistischen Themen eine große Leserschaft aufgebaut. Bis vor kurzem wurde Compact – anders als der Großteil der nationalistischen Szene in Deutschland – von den Behörden unbehelligt gelassen, großzügig finanziert und weit verbreitet.
Das auffälligste Merkmal von Compact war/ist seine sklavische Hingabe an Wladimir Putin. Unter dem Deckmantel von „Friedens“-Aufrufen hat es ständig Kreml-Propaganda verbreitet. Natürlich hat es in jedem Land immer echte Pazifisten gegeben, deren Haltung bis zu einem gewissen Grad respektiert werden muss, auch wenn man nicht mit ihnen übereinstimmt. Doch Elsässer und Compact verfolgen keinen solchen Ansatz und stehen auch nicht in einer nationalistischen Tradition.
Elsässer begann sein politisches Leben als überzeugter Anhänger des Kommunismus und Befürworter der Moskauer Linie, wie sie in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren war: anti-nazistisch, antirassistisch usw. In den 1990er Jahren gehörte er zu den Gründern dessen, was (ob Sie es glauben oder nicht) stolz als „antideutsche“ Bewegung bezeichnet wurde. Diese spezielle linke Fraktion argumentierte, dass Deutschland eine inhärente historische Tendenz zu Verbrechen im „Nazi“-Stil habe und dass Deutschland deshalb nie wieder ein funktionsfähiges Militär haben oder eine ernsthafte Rolle in internationalen Angelegenheiten spielen dürfe.
Elsässers „antideutsche“ Bewegung wurde berüchtigt, weil sie bei Gedenkfeiern zum Terrorbombenanschlag von Dresden 1945 auftauchte und skandierte: „Bomber Harris, do it again!” („Bomber Harris, mach es nochmal!“). Für sie konnte Deutschland nicht hart genug bestraft werden, und so schwach Deutschland auch wurde, es verdiente eine weitere Erniedrigung.
Aber – und das ist sehr bezeichnend – diese „antideutsche“ Tendenz äußerte sich auch in der Ablehnung der deutschen Beteiligung an Militäroperationen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien. Rückblickend (was auch immer wir sonst über den jugoslawischen Bürgerkrieg dieser Zeit denken mögen) können wir die Kontinuität erkennen: Leute wie Elsässer vertraten konsequent die Linie des Kremls, ob in den letzten Jahrzehnten der Sowjetunion, der korrupten Jelzin-Ära oder der neostalinistischen Putin-Ära.
Es spielte keine Rolle, ob diese Linie „anti-nazistisch“, pro-serbisch oder anti-ukrainisch war: Wenn es die Linie des Kremls war, wurde sie von Elsässers Bande treu befolgt.
In den 2000er Jahren erkannte Putins Geheimdienst, wie sehr der Irakkrieg der Glaubwürdigkeit des Westens (sogar im Inland) geschadet hatte, und begann, aus der unkonzentrierten Dissidenz und den Verschwörungstheorien eines Publikums leichtgläubiger Online-Leser Kapital zu schlagen, das die traditionellen Kategorien „links“ und „rechts“ ersetzte.
Zwischen 2009 und 2011 infiltrierte diese Moskauer Linie die „rechte“ Szene in Deutschland beispielsweise über zwei aufwändig produzierte Zeitschriften. Zuerst! hatte seine Wurzeln in echten nationalistischen Bewegungen, wurde aber ab 2011 von einem Kreml-Agenten, Manuel Ochsenreiter, herausgegeben. Mit finanzieller Unterstützung seiner Moskauer Herren (darunter der Oligarch Konstantin Malofejew) unternahm Ochsenreiter weite Reisen (vor allem in den Nahen Osten) und knüpfte Kontakte zu anderen Nationalisten – er war beispielsweise dem stellvertretenden Herausgeber von H&D und unserem verstorbenen Kameraden Richard Edmonds wohlbekannt und arbeitete im Europaparlamentsbüro eines AfD-Politikers.
Ochsenreiter stand lange unter Verdacht, ein russischer Agent zu sein, und seine Karriere endete 2019, als zwei polnische „rechtsextreme“ Aktivisten, die er beauftragt hatte, einen Terroranschlag in der ukrainischen Grenzstadt Uschhorod zu verüben, auf frischer Tat ertappt wurden und gestanden.
Obwohl sein Anwalt die üblichen schwachen Dementis von sich gab, wusste Ochsenreiter, dass das Spiel vorbei war. Angesichts der Terrorismusvorwürfe floh er nach Moskau und suchte den Schutz seiner Herren. Ochsenreiter, der nun eine Peinlichkeit für Putin darstellte, starb im Alter von 45 Jahren in einem Moskauer Krankenhaus an einem Herzinfarkt. (Die Tatsache, dass die Mainstream-Medien, einschließlich der BBC, gelegentlich die Wahrheit über Ochsenreiter und seine russischen Agentenkollegen berichtet haben, macht sie nicht weniger wahr! Beschämenderweise haben die Mainstream-Medien mehr Wahrheit über Putin erzählt als die meisten „alternativen“ Medien: ein trauriges Symptom der Krankheit unserer Bewegung.)
Zuerst! verbreitet weiterhin Moskaus Lügen, aber Compact (das etwa zur gleichen Zeit auf den Markt kam und weniger eng mit der nationalistischen Szene verbunden war) wurde zu einem weitaus einflussreicheren Sprachrohr Putins. Bis Februar dieses Jahres, als bestimmte Verkaufsstellen begannen, es nicht mehr in ihr Sortiment aufzunehmen, war Compact an den wichtigsten Zeitungskiosken auf den Straßen und Bahnhöfen deutscher Städte weithin erhältlich.
Natürlich griff Elsässers Magazin jedes modische Thema auf, das mit der weit gefassten dissidenten Rechten in Verbindung gebracht wurde, von antiislamischen Bewegungen wie PEGIDA bis hin zu Anti-Impf- und Anti-Lockdown-Demos, allerdings ohne etwas zu fördern, das man als kohärente nationalistische Ideologie bezeichnen könnte (was angesichts von Elsässers eigenen Wurzeln in der kommunistischen Linken nicht überraschend ist).
Doch wie unsere Freunde von Dritte Weg betont haben, scheint sich das Innenministerium der Bundesrepublik nicht auf den verräterischen Putinismus von Elsässer und Compact als Grundlage für ihr Verbot gestützt zu haben.
Stattdessen plapperte Ministerin Nancy Faeser über „Rassismus“ und „Antisemitismus“ – die üblichen „Verbrechen“ gegen die Wokeness. Sie erklärte ausdrücklich, dass die Behörden „nicht zulassen würden, dass ethnische Definitionen verwendet werden, um zu definieren, wer zu Deutschland gehört und wer nicht.“
Die Botschaft ist klar – Ethnonationalismus selbst soll kriminalisiert und sogar verfassungswidrig gemacht werden. (Die Ironie dabei ist, dass Compact in keiner ernsthaften Weise ethnonationalistisch ist!)
Insofern ist die Klage gegen Compact eine Klage gegen uns alle, auch wenn die Bundesrepublik in der Vergangenheit schon öfter solche Verbote versucht hat, dann aber vor Gericht gescheitert ist, und das könnte auch diesmal wieder passieren.
Bedeutet das, dass wir uns alle trotz klarer und offensichtlicher politischer Differenzen zusammenschließen und Compact gegen Zensur verteidigen sollten?
Nein: Es gibt zwei gute Gründe, warum wir uns gegen Zensur stellen, uns aber auch von Compact distanzieren sollten.
Erstens: Es hat keinen Sinn, alle Opfer zu bringen und alle Risiken eines nationalistischen politischen Lebens auf uns zu nehmen, wenn wir bereit sind, unsere Prinzipien zu opfern und klare ideologische Trennlinien zu ignorieren. Der Feind unseres Feindes ist nicht unbedingt unser Freund – deshalb marschierten europäische Rassennationalisten nicht zur Unterstützung der „antizionistischen“ Al-Qaida- oder IS-Sympathisanten, als diese nach Guantanamo verschleppt wurden. Dasselbe gilt heute für die Putinisten, was damals für den IS galt: Sie sind unser Feind, ob sie nun auch in einem echten Ausmaß der Feind unseres Feindes sind oder nicht.
Zweitens, wie der Fall Manuel Ochsenreiter zeigt, geben wir unseren Herrschern einen Stock, mit dem sie uns schlagen können, wenn wir zulassen, dass unsere Sache durch offensichtlichen Verrat beschmutzt wird. Vielleicht wird der Staat, wenn der Zusammenbruch des multirassischen Experiments immer offensichtlicher wird, irgendeinen Vorwand finden, uns einzusperren.
Aber machen wir es ihnen nicht leicht, indem wir unsere Sache mit dem Unhaltbaren in Verbindung bringen. Lassen wir nicht zu, dass unsere Sache in die Putinsche Gosse gezogen wird.
Europäische Nationalisten sollten sich gegen Zensur stellen; wir sollten das Recht unserer Kameraden auf freie Meinungsäußerung unterstützen; aber wir sollten die antinationalistischen, antieuropäischen Verräter Jürgen Elsässer und das Compact-Magazin nicht unterstützen.
La censura y la ‘mayor traición’
[Este artículo también está disponible en inglés y alemán.]
“La última tentación es la mayor traición: Hacer la acción correcta por la razón equivocada.”
Cuando T.S. Eliot escribió estas líneas en Asesinato en la catedral, pensaba en las tentaciones de la vanidad intelectual y el autoengrandecimiento que potencialmente manchan la motivación incluso de un mártir religioso.
Vale la pena que cualquiera que aspire a un liderazgo político piense en las reflexiones de Eliot sobre el arzobispo Thomas Becket, especialmente en una causa disidente como el nacionalismo racial, pero hoy esas líneas me vinieron a la mente por otras razones, basadas en el sombrío estado de la política europea del siglo XXI, en lugar de poesía del siglo XX o historia medieval.
La semana pasada, la revista alemana Compact fue prohibida por el Ministro del Interior de la República Federal, quien citó una supuesta incitación al odio racial (y todos los habituales “crímenes contra el despertar”) por parte de la revista y su editor Jürgen Elsässer.
Sin embargo, como han señalado nuestros amigos de Dritte Weg (que es una de las pocas organizaciones nacionalistas alemanas genuinas y no está contaminada por la cobardía y la traición que impregna la escena “patriótica”), esta última prohibición es más complicada de lo que parece.
Para ser claros: Compact y Jürgen Elsässer (a diferencia de Dritte Weg) no son verdaderos nacionalistas ni siquiera verdaderos patriotas. La revista ha conseguido un gran número de lectores sobre la base de teorías de conspiración al estilo estadounidense y posturas superficiales sobre temas cuasi nacionalistas. Hasta hace poco –a diferencia de la mayor parte de la escena nacionalista en Alemania– Compact no había sido molestado por las autoridades, estaba generosamente financiado y se había distribuido ampliamente.
La característica más llamativa del Compact fue/es su servil devoción a Vladimir Putin. Bajo la apariencia de llamados a la “paz”, ha difundido persistentemente propaganda del Kremlin. Por supuesto, en todas las naciones siempre ha habido pacifistas genuinos, cuya postura debe, en cierto modo, respetarse incluso si uno no está de acuerdo con ellos. Pero Elsässer y Compact no vienen de ahí. Tampoco tienen sus raíces en ninguna forma de tradición nacionalista.
Elsässer comenzó su vida política como un devoto seguidor del comunismo y defensor de la línea de Moscú, como lo fue durante los años 1970 y 1980: antinazi, antirracista, etc. Durante los años 1990 estuvo entre los fundadores de lo que (¡increíblemente!) fue denominado con orgullo el movimiento “antialemán”. Esta facción izquierdista en particular argumentó que Alemania tenía una tendencia histórica inherente hacia crímenes de estilo “nazi” y, por lo tanto, que nunca más se le debería permitir a Alemania tener un ejército viable o desempeñar un papel serio en los asuntos internacionales.
El movimiento “antialemán” de Elsässer se hizo famoso por aparecer en las conmemoraciones del atentado terrorista de Dresde de 1945 y corear: “¡Bombardero Harris, hazlo de nuevo!” Para ellos, Alemania no podía ser castigada con la suficiente severidad y, por muy débil que se volviera, merecía ser degradada aún más.
Pero –muy significativamente– esta tendencia “antialemana” también tomó la forma de oponerse a la participación alemana en operaciones militares en la ex Yugoslavia. En retrospectiva (cualquier otra cosa que podamos pensar sobre la guerra civil yugoslava de esa época) podemos ver la continuidad: personas como Elsässer adoptaron consistentemente la línea del Kremlin, ya sea durante las últimas décadas de la Unión Soviética, la era corrupta de Yeltsin o la Era neoestalinista de Putin.
No importaba si esta línea era “antinazi”, proserbia o antiucraniana: si era la línea del Kremlin, era fielmente seguida por la banda de Elsässer.
Durante la década de 2000, reconociendo el daño que la guerra de Irak había causado a la credibilidad de Occidente (incluso internamente), el servicio de inteligencia de Putin comenzó a capitalizar la disidencia mal enfocada y las teorías de conspiración entre una audiencia de lectores crédulos en línea que estaba reemplazando categorías tradicionales de “izquierda” y “derecha”.
Entre 2009 y 2011, esta línea de Moscú se infiltró en la escena de la “derecha” en Alemania a través (por ejemplo) de dos revistas de costosa producción. ¡Zuerst! tenía raíces en genuinos movimientos nacionalistas, pero desde 2011 fue editado por un agente del Kremlin, Manuel Ochsenreiter. Con el respaldo financiero de sus maestros de Moscú (incluido el oligarca Konstantin Malofeev), Ochsenreiter viajó mucho (especialmente en el Medio Oriente) y estableció contactos con otros nacionalistas; era muy conocido, por ejemplo, por el editor asistente de H&D y por nuestro difunto camarada Richard Edmonds, y trabajó en la oficina parlamentaria europea de un político de AfD.
Sospechoso durante mucho tiempo de ser un agente ruso, la carrera de Ochsenreiter terminó en 2019 cuando dos activistas polacos de “extrema derecha” a quienes había encargado llevar a cabo un ataque terrorista en la ciudad fronteriza ucraniana de Uzhhorod fueron capturados con las manos en la masa y confesaron.
Aunque su abogado emitió las débiles negativas habituales, Ochsenreiter sabía que el juego había terminado. Ante acusaciones de terrorismo, huyó a Moscú y buscó la protección de sus amos. Ahora una vergüenza para Putin, Ochsenreiter murió de un conveniente ataque cardíaco en un hospital de Moscú, a la edad de 45 años. (El hecho de que los principales medios de comunicación, incluida la BBC, hayan informado ocasionalmente la verdad sobre Ochsenreiter y sus compañeros agentes rusos no significa que sea es menos cierto. Vergonzosamente, los principales medios de comunicación han dicho más verdades sobre Putin que la mayoría de los medios “alternativos”: un triste síntoma de la enfermedad de nuestro movimiento).
¡Zuerst! continúa vendiendo las mentiras de Moscú, pero Compact (lanzado casi al mismo tiempo y con una conexión menos umbilical con la escena nacionalista) se convirtió en un portavoz putinista mucho más influyente. Hasta febrero de este año, cuando algunos medios comenzaron a negarse a venderlo, Compact estaba ampliamente disponible en los principales quioscos de noticias en las calles y estaciones de ferrocarril de pueblos y ciudades alemanas.
Naturalmente, la revista de Elsässer se aferró a todos los temas de moda relacionados con la derecha disidente ampliamente definida, desde movimientos antiislámicos como PEGIDA hasta manifestaciones antivacunas y anticonfinamientos, aunque sin promover nada que pudiera describirse como una ideología nacionalista coherente ( lo cual no es sorprendente dadas las raíces del propio Elsässer en la izquierda comunista).
Sin embargo, como han señalado nuestros amigos de Dritte Weg, el Ministerio del Interior de la república federal no parece haber confiado en el traicionero putinismo de Elsässer y Compact como base para su prohibición.
En cambio, la ministra Nancy Faeser parloteó sobre el “racismo” y el “antisemitismo”, todos los “crímenes” habituales contra el despertar. Declaró específicamente que las autoridades “no permitirían que se utilizaran definiciones étnicas para definir quién pertenece a Alemania y quién no”.
El mensaje es claro: el etnonacionalismo en sí debe ser criminalizado y, de hecho, declarado inconstitucional. (¡La ironía es que Compact no es etnonacionalista en ningún sentido serio!)
En este sentido, la acción contra Compact es una acción contra todos nosotros, aunque la república federal tiene un historial de intentar tales prohibiciones pero luego fracasar en los tribunales, y lo mismo podría suceder esta vez.
¿Significa esto que todos deberíamos unirnos, a pesar de las diferencias políticas claras y obvias, y defender Compact contra la censura?
No: hay dos buenas razones por las que deberíamos oponernos a la censura, pero también distanciarnos del Compact.
En primer lugar, no tiene sentido hacer todos los sacrificios y correr todos los riesgos que implica la vida política nacionalista si estamos dispuestos a sacrificar nuestros principios e ignorar líneas divisorias ideológicas claras. El enemigo de nuestro enemigo no es necesariamente nuestro amigo, razón por la cual los nacionalistas raciales europeos no marcharon en apoyo de los simpatizantes “antisionistas” de Al Qaeda o del EI cuando fueron llevados a Guantánamo. Lo mismo se aplica a los putinistas ahora, como se aplicaba entonces al EI: son nuestro enemigo, sean o no, en cierta medida, enemigos genuinos de nuestro enemigo.
En segundo lugar, como lo demuestra el caso de Manuel Ochsenreiter, si permitimos que nuestra causa se vea manchada por una traición flagrante, le estamos dando a nuestros gobernantes un palo con el que golpearnos. Quizás, a medida que el colapso del experimento multirracial se haga cada vez más evidente, el Estado encontrará alguna excusa para internarnos.
Pero no se lo pongamos fácil asociando nuestra causa a lo indefendible. No permitamos que nuestra causa sea arrastrada a la cloaca putinista.
Los nacionalistas europeos deberían oponerse a la censura; debemos apoyar el derecho de nuestros camaradas a la libre expresión; pero no debemos respaldar a los traidores antinacionalistas y antieuropeos Jürgen Elsässer y la revista Compact.
Historic win for anti-immigration party AfD
The anti-immigration German civic nationalist party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) took control of a town council for the first time on Sunday when AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann was elected ‘district administrator’ of Sonneberg, a town of just over 20,000 inhabitants in Thuringia.
Sonneberg is in the east of today’s Federal Republic, though in the centre of traditional Germany.
AfD was founded as a right-wing Conservative party espousing what British voters would call ‘Thatcherite’ economic policies, but has steadily moved to the right and is now mainly identified with a strong anti-immigration stance. The Thuringian region of AfD is seen as especially right-wing and controlled by the party’s so-called Flügel or ‘wing’ led by Björn Höcke, who has made controversial remarks on racial and historical topics.
The party was greatly boosted by Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million extra immigrants and ‘asylum seekers’ in 2016 – a policy which alienated many traditional conservative voters who had once backed Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU.
After losing its focus and slipping in the polls during the pandemic, AfD has greatly revived during the past 18 months due to economic problems that are felt especially keenly in regions such as Thuringia that were part of the old East Germany.
Voters in such areas are often nostalgic for aspects of communist rule, without being ‘left-wing’ in the usual sense of that term.
And partly for reasons discussed in a broader context by Ian Freeman in the forthcoming issue 115 of H&D, hard-pressed voters in such areas believe that environmentalist policies pushed by the German Green Party (who are coalition partners with liberals and socialists in the present federal government) are an ill-considered luxury that the country can ill-afford right now.
Foreign and defence policy has little relevance to a local election in a small town, so the controversial pro-Moscow stance taken by some AfD leaders is unlikely to have had a decisive influence on Sonneberg’s voters.
This latter AfD policy is utterly rejected both by the right-wing of CDU and CSU (who sympathised with AfD on immigration) and by the racial nationalist party III Weg (which regards Putinism as a betrayal of Germany’s and Europe’s fundamental interests, and strongly supports Ukraine’s defiance of the Kremlin).
Nevertheless, AfD’s latest electoral success has alarmed the liberal-left establishment and might be a sign that increasing numbers of German voters are no longer afraid to assert their national identity and turn back the immigration tide.
Change to German electoral system – is Sir Keir watching?
This week the German coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals began moves to reform the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in what would be their country’s biggest constitutional shake-up for many years.
With electoral reform likely to be on the UK’s political agenda after the Conservatives almost certainly lose the next general election (due by January 2025 at the very latest) the choices made in Berlin are worth examining. Especially because their present government is ideologically very similar to a likely Labour-led coalition in the UK.
Germany has a hybrid system, with some MPs elected on a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system, but others elected via a top-up list so as to make the entire Bundestag represent the nationwide percentage share of the vote.
This hybrid system means that the Bundestag is not simply divided proportionally to match the parties’ share of the vote. For example, to gain proportionally-based seats, a party must poll at least 5% nationwide, or qualify for proportional top-ups if it wins at least three directly-elected seats. This happened recently with the far-left party Die Linke.
On the other hand, a party with a very strong regional base can end up winning more directly elected seats than a proportional carve-up would have given them. This is the case with Bavaria’s conservative party CSU. Extra seats are created to balance out such anomalies and are known as ‘overhang’ seats: these have meant that the present Bundestag is the largest ever, with 736 MPs.
This week’s proposed reform would eliminate ‘overhang’ seats, and fix the number of German MPs at 598.
At a basic level the reform is likely to be popular with voters, since it will save money and cut bureaucracy. And it’s a cunning move by the government because it will weaken the CSU. Even though CSU is the sister party of CDU, the present system of ‘overhang’ balancing takes no account of that, and gives an artificial boost to the combined CDU-CSU strength.
Reforming this would be likely to make any future conservative-led government more dependent on a deal with parties further to the right – presently AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) or whichever party succeeds AfD if it splits/declines. Unsurprisingly, the present reform is similar to a policy that the AfD itself promoted four years ago.
Here in the UK the party in a similar position to CSU (though very different ideologically) is Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party. The present electoral system gives the SNP grossly inflated importance at Westminster, relative to its share of the UK-wide vote. At the last general election SNP won 3.9% of the UK-wide vote, and 48 MPs (i.e. 7.4% of the House of Commons). The system almost doubled the SNP’s importance at Westminster, and this would be far more important in the event of no major party gaining a Commons majority, thus making Sturgeon and her allies kingmakers.
By contrast a more purely proportional system would probably give a populist/nationalist party (i.e. whatever replaces Reform UK and UKIP) more Westminster seats than the SNP. The other big winners from a change to a German-style system would almost certainly be the Greens.
Most importantly for racial nationalists, it would end the ‘wasted vote’ argument that has so far prevented many of those who sympathise with our ideas from voting for a racial nationalist party.
Race-mixers and conspiracist cranks – the German ‘coup plot’ farce
Here at H&D we thought we had seen every possible method of discrediting the nationalist cause, and every form of embarrassment among our so-called leaders dragging the noble ideals of racial nationalism into the gutter.
But the tragi-comedy of this week’s “far right coup plot” in Germany has plumbed new depths.
When raids took place across Germany (plus one in Austrian and one in Italy) early on Wednesday morning, we were told that a German Prince and various “far right” politicians and ex-military figures had been plotting to overthrow German “democracy” and restore the monarchy.
This was said to be based on a so-called Reichsbürger movement who deny the legitimacy of the present German state.
As it happens they have a pretty good case. German “democracy” has after all brought in tyrannical laws silencing historical debate, and is on the point of sending the 94-year-old scholar Ursula Haverbeck back to prison for the “crime” of questioning the “Holocaust” and asking whether it was truly feasible for six million Jews to have been murdered in supposed “homicidal gas chambers” on the apparently non-existent orders of Adolf Hitler.
Earlier this week this same German “democracy” staged another political show trial against the philosopher and former lawyer Horst Mahler, who will be 87 next month and has had both legs amputated due to health conditions aggravated by previous prison sentences for Orwellian “thought crimes”.
Notwithstanding this tyrannical treatment of its own citizens, the present-day Federal Republic is of very doubtful legitimacy: it doesn’t have a proper constitution, only a “Basic Law” that was drafted as a temporary measure for the former West Germany when it emerged from Anglo-American military occupation. The idea was that this Basic Law would eventually be superseded by a new constitution voted on by an eventually reunified German people.
That referendum never happened and the “temporary” Basic Law remains in force.
So the alleged coup plotters in some ways had a sound argument. We have no idea whether the lurid stories of attempted armed insurrection were true, false or half-true. Doubtless more details will emerge at future trials.
What we do know is that the ideological background of the “coup plotters” is an utter shambles, bearing no relation to any form of racial nationalism, let alone national socialism.
The latest to be unveiled is a celebrity chef who worked for the prince. This chef, Frank Heppner, was married to an Asian: his half-Asian daughter is the girlfriend of an “Austrian” negro footballer David Alaba, whose father is Nigerian and mother from the Philippines.
In short, a model European family!!!
And these are the people who were going to save Germany: a sick joke.
They have nothing to do with racial nationalism or national socialism. Rather they represent the decadent remnant of Eurotrash “aristocracy” and reactionary politics, with an ideology cobbled together from pre-war “conservative revolutionaries” and 21st century crank conspiracy theory.
It is embarrassing that they could in any way be linked to the true European cause.
European nationalists celebrate Ursula Haverbeck’s 94th birthday as she faces new jail sentence
Ursula Haverbeck is one of Europe’s bravest and most intelligent campaigners for historical truth and justice. In 1963 she and her late husband Werner Haverbeck founded the Collegium Humanum – an educational institute based at their home in the northern German town of Vlotho.
The Collegium provided a wide range of educational and ideological training for several generations of Germans, with speakers including the intellectual founder of the modern European environmentalist movement, Dr E.F. Schumacher.
In 1992 Ursula became active in an organisation seeking to build proper memorials for the German civilian victims of the Second World War, whether victims of the terror-bombing campaign by the Western allies, or the campaign of mass rapes, murders and expulsions by Stalin’s Red Army.
This might have been thought a simple acknowledgment of historical fact, but increasingly Ursula drew the hostile attention of German state authorities who wished to impose an authorised version of history.
Increasingly this state-imposed version of history has concentrated on criminalising any attempt to question the alleged ‘Holocaust’ of six million Jews in supposed homicidal gas chambers on the presumed orders of Adolf Hitler.
Historians, scientists and even lawyers who draw attention to the serious evidential problems with the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ narrative were first demonised and driven out of their jobs, then criminalised, and increasingly subjected to long jail sentences.
Ursula herself was first fined for this invented thought-crime of ‘Holocaust denial’ – defined in Germany as Volksverhetzung, or ‘public incitement’ – in 2004.
Since then she has repeatedly been dragged into court, despite her advancing years, for the ‘crime’ of asking politely worded questions about ‘Holocaust’ history in letters to academics, politicians, and other public figures; for writing historical articles in magazines; and more recently for the ‘crime’ of answering questions in an online video interview.
From May 2018 until November 2020 Ursula served two and a half years in prison for such ‘crimes’, and earlier this year she was sentenced to a further 12 months imprisonment.
After her appeal was turned down, Ursula was due to enter prison on October 25th but this has been delayed for procedural reasons, so she was not in fact behind bars on her 94th birthday yesterday.
H&D understands that her jailing is however imminent.
A campaign in support of Ursula Haverbeck is already beginning across Europe. To celebrate her birthday yesterday the Spanish organisation Devenir Europeo displayed a banner in Madrid honouring Ursula’s courage and indomitable intellectual fortitude. One of the campaign organisers is H&D‘s European correspondent Isabel Peralta.
A new generation of European patriots and intellectuals are challenging the lies that have been imposed on our continent for more than seventy years.
Ursula Haverbeck will begin prison sentence on October 25th
The courageous 93-year-old German publisher and educator Ursula Haverbeck has been told that she must report to prison on 25th October to begin a 12 month sentence.
This is for the “crime” of daring to dispute aspects of her own country’s history. We have reported regularly on Ursula’s case, most recently in August when her appeal was refused.
Updates on the campaign against this disgraceful persecution of a nonagenarian intellectual and patriot will be published soon.
Death threat to H&D author as Zionist vandals hit German art gallery
As part of an escalating dispute between Zionist extremists and the pro-Palestinian movement, vandals have attacked Germany’s most famous exhibition of contemporary art, defacing the site with graffiti threatening H&D writer Isabel Peralta.
Far from intimidating Miss Peralta or H&D, these death threats perfectly illustrate the contradictions that have overtaken once-allied movements of International Zionism and the ‘multicultural’ Left.
The attack occurred earlier this week at documenta – an exhibition that takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel at the Fridericianum, one of Europe’s oldest museums, which for more than thirty years has been dedicated to ‘contemporary art’.
While Kassel is best known as the home of the Brothers Grimm – archetypal chroniclers of German folk tales – this documenta festival was intended from its inception almost seventy years ago as a celebration of modernism and a rejection of national-socialism. It was founded in 1955 by an ‘anti-nazi’ artist and teacher – Arnold Bode, who set out to celebrate those artists who had been ‘forbidden’ or discouraged during the Third Reich.
Bode curated the first four documenta events but since 1972 a committee of experts has appointed a different artistic director each time. The 2022 event – the fifteenth in the series held every five years – is directed by ruangrupa, a ‘contemporary art collective’ based in Indonesia.
However, months before the exhibition was due to open, Jewish lobby groups began to attack these Indonesians for their support of the ‘Boycott Divestment and Sanctions’ movement (BDS) that seeks to isolate the State of Israel for its increasingly brutal treatment of the Palestinians.
The attack was focused on one of ruangrupa‘s partners in the exhibition – the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, which is Palestine’s leading artistic organisation.
As in the UK, Zionists and their support network in Germany have sought to demonise and criminalise the BDS movement, in the latest of their usual manoeuvres to portray victims as culprits.
Several meetings have been held between leading German Jews and Claudia Roth, a politician from the Green Party who is now Culture Minister in the federal German government, having overall political responsibility for major artistic events such as documenta.
Zionist commentators in the German media had been very critical of Ms Roth but were becoming more confident that their lobbying was having effect. However the violent wing of the Zionist movement has now jeopardised this ‘progress’ by taking matters into their own hands and physically attacking the exhibition a month before it is due to open.
Late last Friday night or early Saturday morning, burglars from this Zionist faction broke into the building in Kassel where the exhibition is being prepared. On the walls of the building they sprayed the number ‘187’ (typically used in ‘rap’ and graffiti ‘culture’ as a reference to Section 187 of the California Penal Code, i.e. murder) and the name ‘Peralta’.
German police and journalists all assume that this referred to Isabel Peralta, the young Spanish nationalist now writing for Heritage and Destiny who was controversially banned from entering Germany two months ago.
Isabel has attracted controversy since February last year when she spoke at a memorial for the Division Azul, Spanish volunteers who fought alongside German forces against Stalin’s Red Army on the Eastern Front after 1941.
She has also spoken out against the Spanish government’s failure to control immigration, and has addressed demonstrations in support of the embattled Palestinians.
It seems clear that the Zionist vandals were intending to threaten both Isabel Peralta and the pro-Palestinian groups involved in organising the documenta exhibition.
To his credit, the Mayor of Kassel quickly denounced the attack: “Having discussions about documenta fifteen is one thing, wanting to intimidate artists with criminal offences goes far beyond what is acceptable.”
H&D is continuing to investigate the extremist Zionist networks behind this attack.
One irony is that for most of the 20th century (and even today) prominent Jews and Organised Jewry were champions of the most extreme forms of contemporary art, seeking to ‘deconstruct’ Western civilisation. The former treasurer of the Conservative Party – Ehud Sheleg, presently the focus of controversy over an allegedly illegal Russian donation – is a prime example.
As with other forms of ‘multiculturalism’ promoted for a century by leading Jewish spokesmen – notably mass non-White immigration into Europe – Zionists are now reaping what they have sown.
The next issue of H&D will include an article by Isabel Peralta viewing the ‘Decline of the West’ through the prism of art. This week’s criminal vandalism and death threats will not deter her or us.
