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About 200,000 people protest across Germany against far-right AfD party
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Almost all Germans have bad family experiences from that time as well.
Either you lost someone due to Nazi terror, or you lost someone who was being a Nazi.
I expect neither is an experience that anyone would cherish to relive.
In places that were invaded, resistance were thrown from the top of buildings after they were interrogated, their bodies were left there to be collected by whoever dared. At night all you could hear were their screams while they were being tortured in cellars by the Gestapo. Dissidents were hanged from lampposts in the main street and left as warnings. The concentration camps were often in the middle of the town, not placed at a distance to avoid offending the locals.
And the next generation in those places grew up right next to those concentration camps and mass graves. They were raised by physically and psychologically scarred people, in places that were not funded by the Marshall Plan reconstruction funds that even West Germany received. Decades later there was still rubble and half destroyed buildings.
I appreciate there is much trauma involved in losing any family, friends or community members to war, or to experiencing the bombs being dropped around you. But, I think the level of cruelty and fear experienced by invaded regions was next level. And I don't think Germans generally understand the details of what life was like for the places that were occupied - but that is only my suspicion. I can't understand how else the AfD could discuss deportations or receive such a huge proportion of the vote.
Neither Axis aligned country tesidents nor the invaded would cherish reliving it, but they have had and continue to have very very different experiences as a consequence of the war.
If my post came across as a comparison, it was not meant to. Of course the average scale and intensity would be higher in occupied territories.
I just wanted to highlight that a vast majority of Germans have both the knowledge of the terror their ancestors committed due to the schools' focus on keeping every new generation well educated on it, while combining it with the traumas their own family or communities experienced.
This combines into a fairly strong anti fascist society.
Yes, we have neo nazis and all other flavors of right wing extremists, but they have much less real power than some international media reporting might make you think. Exactly because the majority of society is sensitive to this and does rise against it in numbers.
Even before the current wave, there never was a right wing demonstration or rally that wasn't accompanied by a liberal counter rally with at least a hundred times their number. And even then those weren't left wing extremists or other political radicals in the majority. Most of these types of rallies have a large number of very boring participants, people that are close to apolitical otherwise.
Regarding AfD: remember it's not an openly fascist party, unlike the previously existing NPD, which is now forbidden. AfD claims to be a neo conservative party, a bit further right than the big CDU ( which is center-right). And the AfD keeps dancing on this line, in some areas actively pushing out people as soon as their fascist activities become known and turning themselves, while simultaneously following a slightly tamer route. It's a dangerous and effective way of moving the goal posts of public discourse, especially with no other party effectively engaging their topics. The AfD group revraled to participate in the current nasty discussions is not even a hundred people. I'm confident you'll find a couple dozen idiots of their scale in every larger city of this world.
But every time they slip up like this in Germany, they experience massive setbacks.
It's still important to recognize their danger and work against them, but Germany is far from lost to their twisted ideology. But media does like to be sensationalistic, even when it has good intentions.
A US comparison might be how the tea party developed as an offspring of the Republicans, and how they subsequently shifted the entire political landscape, despite them actually only bring a rather small group. So many unthinkable policies that nobody would have even considered worth a discussion are now on the table for actual legislative processes.