Author Archives: admin

Jun 27 2016
Performance, Refugees

Eating Refugees: Center for Political Beauty

One of the first posts I made to this blog was about the Center for Political Beauty, back then a fledgling performance art/activist organization which had undertaken several short-lived, performative events to raise awareness about refugee politics. In that post, I wondered about both the role of performance in political struggle and how long such a group would persist.

The Center for Political Beauty has developed a new piece that is both sweeping in its ambition and extremely complicated. “Eating Refugees”/Flüchtlinge Fressen has generated a massive amount of media attention and political ire, and focuses on an arcane piece of EU legislation which fines airlines for bringing refugees who have no visa to Europe by plane. Germany has a national law which adopts this EU document. Since the German Embassy in Syria has long since been closed, it is impossible for Syrians to get a visa to Germany before they board a plane. If airlines won’t transport refugees, because the fines for doing so would be bad for business, refugees are driven to rely on human traffickers who charge much more money and follow a route which entails certain risk and possible death.

Modeled on Roman gladiator games, the CPB has erected a stage and two cages with four Libyan tigers next to the Gorki Theater in Berlin.  If the government doesn’t relent, and allow the plane to land, the CPB declares it has 9 refugees who are willing to be fed to the tigers and “be eaten by Europe.”

The CPB has chartered a plane, the Joachim 1, that hopes to bring 100 people from Syria to land at Berlin-Tegel on June 28 (tomorrow). Doing so is in violation of German law. The video below explains the project (kind of), and includes subtitles in English.

On another website, called “Flugbereitschaft” / “Ready to Fly,” the CPB breaks down the legal precedents which created this policy, listing each document in PDF form as the archive which informs the project. They use another animated video to explain the process by which refugees are driven to leave by foot, many of them drowning in the Mediterranean as a matter of course.

The cages and stage set up outside near the Gorki Theater have had their permit revoked, but are still standing. In fact, the CPB has set up live feeds on YouTube where you can look at each tiger cage or look at the stage. The stage, sits underneath a sign naming the space “Center’s Salon of the Last Beauty.” Huge mirrors reflect the audience back at themselves, a common technique to symbol self-reflection.

Since June 16, a variety of guests have come to discuss European refugee politics. These discussions have been archived as podcasts you can find here.

Christiane Kühl, writing for Die Zeit, describes the CPB as a group which

time and again has tried to make the discrepancy between our values and our political actions visible through extremely provocative and publicly visible events.

Kühl points out that the Federal Ministry of the Interior tweeted that this “event is cynical and is being carried out on the backs of those in need of protection.” Ironically, this is exactly the critique the CPB has hurled at the German government: that a European policy which finds need to defend itself against refugees is using the refugee crisis to maintain (CDU/CSU/SPD) or approach (AfD) domestic political power.

Kühl comes to the conclusion in her article that the CPB has been successful about educating the public about refugee policy through their free outdoor “salons” and their agitprop campaigns. Although I suspect that cynicism – if the tweet of the BMI is any indication – simply breeds more cynicism, there’s a depth to this campaign which illuminates global processes, domestic politics and articulates how complex transnational bargains affect lives. The tactics of the CPB are very much up for debate. But, after the shock of Brexit, the impulses feeding this campaign counter those of the far right, who argue that everything can be reduced to its simplest parts and that there is valor in reductionism.  And yet, the CPB is not arguing against the European Union (although they do satirically call it the European Empire), but rather points out that there are actions politicians could take to ameliorate pain and thwart human trafficking.

That politicians choose not to do so is cynical enough. The tigers are just for show.

 

UPDATES: 6/28/2016 12:20 pm EST

Today was the day that the Joachim 1 was supposed to fly from to Germany. The CPB posted on their FB site and their project website today in German that AirBerlin, the flight company with whom they had entered into a contractual agreement to charter the plane, has broken the terms of the contract. This post from 8 hours ago signals that the CPB believes the Turkish Embassy became involved in the case, although I suspect that must be considered rumor until further notice.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior posted a very defensive tweet against the action, calling it a “tasteless performance.” You can see the tweeted statement here. The defensiveness of the statement requires future analysis – the tone certainly does not sound confident about the government’s attempts to aid human beings fleeing insecurity.

The police have also expressed concern that an actual suicide could take place in part of the court proceedings about the event. Desperate people have often used suicide as a method of protest. The CPB posted quotes from this document on their FB site as well – although there was no accompanying PDF.

The live YouTube feeds show a crowd gathered outside the stage, and one person in a cage. The tigers pace in a separate enclosure in the background.

 

 

Jun 23 2016
BAMF, Refugees

WDRForYou

The WDR channel has broadcasts in Arabic and English that are answering questions about residency live on FB:

https://www.facebook.com/WDRforyou/

The English video is currently live.

 

May 25 2016
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Humor, Migration, National Identity, PEGIDA, Racism, Refugees Video

Cuteness against PEGIDA

There was a brilliant moment in one of the presidential debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama where Mr. Romney was trying to lambast President Obama for being out of touch with the needs of the American military. Mitt Romney had made an impressive showing in the first debate, and Obama seemed to need a touch-up lesson in debating if he was going to secure reelection. Obama, in response to Romney’s critique that Obama would cut military spending and reduce the military’s size, pounced. Our military is smaller than it was in 1960 because “we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” Obama also patronizes Romney and starts describing military equipment to him as if Romney were 7 years old. You can watch it here.

I’ve long thought that the only way to win, rhetorically, against the radical and extreme rights (although, let’s be clear, Romney is not – compared to Trump – that radical or extreme) is to be funny. Funny, silly, ridiculous, albern, doof – whatever you want to call it. Trying to debate irrational and empty claims with reason is absurd.

Whether Frauke Petry or Donald Trump, the only thing they have on offer are patronizing, authoritarian commentary and a hot temper.

Last Friday, the Kinder (Children) chocolate brand unveiled a new series of packaging that was a masterful marketing ploy to advertise for the European Soccer Championship. The standard packaging shows a blond child as the face of the brand. But somehow, Kinder managed to get childhood pictures of members of the national German soccer team and issued a special edition of the chocolate bars with players like Götze, Schürrle, Kramer – and Gündogan (who has Turkish roots) and Boateng (who has Ghanian roots, and whose brother plays for the Ghanian national team). You can see the video here.

PEGIDA adherents hated it. They posted disparaging comments on Facebook which were taken down by Ferrero, the Italian owner of Kinder.

But PEGIDA, whose leader Lutz Bachmann, was recently convicted on charges of inciting the people, now just looks a little bit “silly,” as the Washington Post and Stern have reported. Not only were Facebook users not having all this disparaging talk, but hundreds of Twitter followers have posted pictures of themselves as children under the hashtag #cutesolidarity, started by Zeit reporter Mohamed Amjahid:

Translated: #cutesolidarity is an antiracist mini-campaign against Pegida and AfD, who spread hate. In constrast, we don’t just win soccer tournaments [by playing] together.

The pictures posted under the hashtag normalize childhood, which is one of the most effective antiracist visual strategies I’ve seen in a long time. Humor helps. The childlike playfulness of this campaign is a strong antidote to the constant temper tantrums of the far-right.

 

 

 

 

May 18 2016
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Humor, Migration, National Identity, Performance

“For Thinking” / Zum Nachdenken

There’s a lot going on, as always, in European politics. Germany has proposed an “integration law” to be enacted later this month. Lutz Bachmann has provisionally been found guilty of inciting the people, a verdict many thought would not materialize and which has yet to be enacted. Austria has elected a far-right chancellor after Werner Faymann, Angela Merkel’s right hand man who helped open the borders last September, abruptly resigned. In Idomeni, tear gas was used against refugees trying to push a train through a border fence. Thousands are still trapped in Greece, and more arrive in Italy daily. Dr. Frauke Petry keeps talking.

But there are some amazing pieces of work being produced in these times.

These two German audio documentaries have given me much to think about in the past week. Anna Frenyo produced this documentary called “The Fence” for SWR last December. In it, she goes deep into the supply lines and politics of construction that led to the construction of a border fence between Hungary and Serbia last fall.

This radio documentary produced for ARD by Thomas Gaevert, which was produced last September, is called “Wer ist das Volk?” or “Who is the people?” Through interviews with former East German guestworkers, primarily from Vietnam and Mozambique, he seeks to find historical continuity between the rhetoric used in the former East to describe foreign workers and the persistence of this rhetoric about foreigners in the paroles of the PEGIDA movement.

 

The folks at wirmachendas.jetzt have such an impressive array of projects that one can get lost in their mix of reportage, reviews and services. The website has an English tab, and one of the aesthetic projects that is highly innovative is the Syrian Mobile Films Festival, which recently had a screening in BOX.Freiraum in Berlin. Building on the use of mobile phone cameras in the Arab protest movements, the Syrian Mobile Films Festival moves throughout Syria and other locations to encourage professional directors and amateurs to make low-budget films with phones. This group also offers the “pixel” training program for emerging young directors through grants and awards.

The mission statement of the SMFF states that it “seeks to present free and different cinematic vision, a vision believes that the higher accuracy image is not necessarily the most clearness one.”

Finally, Idil Baydar has written this piece for ZEIT MAGAZIN, the glossy magazine of the weekly politics and arts newspaper Die Zeit. In it, she performs the code-switching which made her famous as the character Jilet Ayse, whom I blogged about here.

My dream is that we stop blowing smoke. Instead we should finally show young people more respect, recognition and attention. That’s what we call empowerment, it’s real cool, but most Germans don’t know about it. Valla haram Almanya, I swear, that’s not cool, Germany!

She also distinguishes between the freedom of speech and crossing the line to impose discriminatory rule:

You get it? You don’t get nothing? The Jilet in me would say: ok, I’m talking slowly and clearly with you. Pegida can walk to Germania and back, but please, please don’t determine how we, the majority in this beautiful country, should live with each other. Germany, you’re doing AfD, upper limit and stuff. I have solution! We make with you welcoming-kültür workshop, totally da bomb, valla! Chill your life, Germany! Then you be ok, too.

 

 

 

May 03 2016
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AfD, Performance, Politics

AfD Party Meeting in Stuttgart

Last weekend, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD/Alternative for Germany) party met in Stuttgart for their first national party meeting. This meeting was the focus of much attention for several reasons. First, the AfD is a new party, so what they decide at this meeting will shape both the party platform and the party’s ambitions. These ambitions are now clearly focused on national, rather than merely provincial, representation. Second, the party currently has two factions: the neoliberal-conservative group around Frauke Petry, and the nationalist-conservative group around Alexander Gauland, one of the founders of the party as a Euro-sceptic party. How the party will cope with dissent within its ranks is one of the questions political scientist Cas Mudde (UGA) tweeted the day before the meeting began. Given the warm welcome to racist-extremist Björn Höcke, it seems like the AfD will continue moving towards the right.

Finally, the party meeting itself was a controversial event, which inspired intense protest from left-autonomous groups and the preliminary arrests of 400-500 people. The Twitter feed from the German Association of Investigative Journalists posted a press release about crackdowns by police on the freedom of the press on May 2nd, when four photojournalists were arrested for participating in a sitting protest along the highway A8 and blocking traffic. Other charges included threatening behavior (Nötigung) and disturbing the peace. The press release details humiliation by police officers and that two of the journalists needed medical attention. It’s difficult to discern from the video below how extensive the protest was, but newspaper reports describe both protests near the convention center as well as a more peaceful protest in downtown Stuttgart.

 

My favorite use of technology as protest, however, was started by the satirical news broadcast extra-3 (the broadcast responsible for the recent Erdogan jokes). Deciding that the hashtag #AfD should really stand for “Aufmerksamkeit für Dackel” or “Attention to Dachshunds,” Twitter users started using the hashtag to tweet images of Dachshunds, making fun of the party and its approach to power.

The party meeting seems to have been largely symbolic – with a party program almost 80 pages long, the party meeting was hampered by organizational specifics and began late due to the protests. Of the more than 1,500 points to discuss, the party broached merely four. The “Islam Debate” was one of those four, and has caused the most uproar, with the Central Board of Jews in Germany and Green politician Volker Beck loudly condemning the AfD’s decision to include the statement that “Islam does not belong to Germany” in their program. (“Islam belongs to Germany” was a famous statement made by then-Federal President Christian Wulff in response to a racist polemic against Muslims published by Thilo Sarrazin in 2010, which monopolized the German newswaves for months.)

The best recap of the party meeting was by Lenz Jacobsen of Zeit Online, who summarized several important points:

  • Björn Höcke, the radical new right leader from Thüringen, who is infamous for making racist statements especially about Muslims, was the real star of the party. He showed up hours late, said nothing, but was greeted with so much applause that the person leading the meeting was clearly irritated and forced to stop the proceedings.
  • Albrecht Glaser is their candidate for federal president (a largely symbolic office), and was frequently addressed as “Mr. President-Elect.”
  • The provincial arm of the AfD in Saarland has been disbanded from the national AfD for working together with the NPD (Neonazi Party). Federal arbitrators are now the responsible party for the dispute.
  • Jacobsen rightly also points to the contradiction of the AfD and other groups like PEGIDA for hating foreigners who are Muslim, but praising white foreigners – like special guest Vaclav Klaus, former president of Czechia – who share their nationalistic approach. Indeed, for me, this transnational flow of right-wing ideas and collaboration across right-wing nationalistic parties is one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary European nationalist-populism.

Finally, although the AfD has mostly been receiving press attention for their racist ideas towards Muslims and declarations by Beatrix von Storch that she would have border guards shoot refugees trying to enter Germany, queer.de published an important commentary on the heteronormative family biopolitics of the AfD called “Homophobia for Everyone!” The written goals of the AfD include elements of political struggles common to US audiences in the context of “culture wars”: no abortion, children should have two, opposite sex, traditional parents; Gender Studies should be abolished as a discipline; school curricula should not include mentions of homosexual behavior or transgendered folk; the German Christian heritage should be preserved. The ways in which this backlash would affect queer minorities can be intuited; what is important to remember is that backlash against queers extend negative effects to women and girls, single parents, divorced parents, step-families, infertile couples and single adults.

In reading through the program published by the AfD in advance of the meeting last weekend, what struck me is how the AfD party program reads like a textbook of the goals of the new right. There is an emphasis on promoting ethno-nationalist goals for Germany in order to strengthen the nation, all the while hoping to revert to some kind of mythical distant past in which there is no political union amongst European nations and no immigration. Immigrants are explicitly marked as criminal at several points in the program. Despite the prevalence of women at the top ranks of the party (Frauke Petry, Beatrix von Storch and Alice Weidel – who is romantically partnered with a woman), the platform is misogynist and homophobic – which are all part of the more basic repression in extremist movements to “close down the marketplace of ideas” (Lipset & Raab, 1970) and refuse to accept pluralism.

As the Green Party posted after the close of the party meeting:  “AFD: POLITICS FROM A DIFFERENT TIME. – Back to atomic energy, out of Europe, women in the kitchen . . . the program of the AfD is reactionary.”

 

Apr 11 2016
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Greece, Migration, Refugees

Yesterday’s Protest in Idomeni

Yesterday, in response to a flyer circulated in Arabic amongst the 12,000 people stranded in the Idomeni camp on the Greek/Macedonian border, hundreds of refugees attempted to storm the border fence erected on the Macedonian border. They were pushed back by tear gas and rubber bullets. According to Doctors without Borders, more than 260 were injured in the action, including children (tagesschau.de). RUPTLY is an online alternative to press agencies like the AP or DPA and provides raw footage through social media in real time. They’ve posted this link to footage of the protest on Twitter and have a 3 minute video up on YouTube including an interview with refugees in English. The man interviewed states: “But the problem is, that we cannot control 10,000 people. We are the same, we are refugees like them. We hope there is a solution for that.”

What is the solution to being a refugee? Effective and efficient resettlement. But Europe’s border closures have made the movement towards resettlement increasingly difficult.

The New York Times also covered the story and has video footage posted. Their article, however, provides a different slant than in the German articles on tagesschau.de or Spiegel Online. The NYTimes emphasizes the role of the Golden Dawn, a Greek nationalist party, in the protests:

“The clashes in Idomeni, which follow several confrontations there in the last month, came as members of the Greek far-right party Golden Dawn have begun marching in several areas around Greece where migrants are camped or massed at informal gathering points.

The group, whose main leaders were arrested in 2013 on charges of leading a criminal organization, had been largely silent since the migrant crisis took hold. Yet in recent days its leaders, who had since been released from custody, said the party was planning numerous protests around the country against what they warn is the “Islamization of Greece” by Muslim asylum seekers coming mainly from Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”

 

I don’t know enough about Greece to know if this refugee protest is the direct result of nationalist organizing or if that connection is merely a false correlation. The NYTimes article doesn’t make that connection clear. The real issue is that people are being denied the right to claim asylum in the place they desire, whether or not Dublin Regulations are the law of the land.

The push to the right is also the focus of German commentator Oliver Trenkamp,  who published an article late last night on SpiegelOnline which criticized statements by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere and Alexander Gauland (AfD) made about the protest:

“Desperate parents, crying children, tear gas cartridges fired by soldiers in the middle of Europe near the border fence of Idomeni: politicians like Thomas de Maiziere and Alexander Gauland have tried to harden us against the impulse to scream and cry in fury at such pictures. ‘We have to tolerate hard images,’ the Interior Minister says. ‘We can’t let ourselves be extorted by [pictures of] puppydog eyes,’ the Vice-Chairman of the AfD.

They want to turn off our empathy or at least temper it. Bernd Ulrich from Die Zeit calls (the politics Puppydog-Eyes-Gauland and Order-to-Shoot Petry have been waging for months) a ‘campaign of political coarsening.’ And after almost a year of debates about refugees, after the closure of the Balkan Route and the EU-Turkey deal taking effect, you have to agree: they have at least partially succeeded in sharpening the tone of the refugee debates, and pushing the discourse to the right.”

The consequences of this coarsening are not just numbing our capacity for empathy or the success of right-wing parties. The aftermath of the EU/Turkey Deal and the closure of the border between Greece and Macedonia presents multiple opportunities for radicalization. The right-wing nationalist parties of Europe have been successful, as we saw in the recent German provincial elections, at gathering popular support and political power. According to the NYTimes, this is also happening in Greece partly due to the release of Golden Dawn organizers from custody. But what isn’t quite being formulated so bluntly in the media is that a different kind of radicalism has great potential to develop among those refugees being prevented from reaching the locations from which they hope to claim asylum.

The real consequence of a lack of empathy? Potentially more terrorism on European soil. Violence is a product of hopelessness. What we’re observing is the systematic dismantling of hope in places like Idomeni and Piraeus, where thousands of people are trapped and suffering. Trenkamp ends his article with a call to empathy, and the hope that Germany will take on more refugees from Idomeni. What gives him hope, he says, is that many portions of German society have not yet heeded the call to coarsen their politics:

“Doctors and nurses are still working voluntarily in reception centers; teachers, instructors, and students are collecting donations; lawyers are helping with asylum applications; church groups, roommates, and families are taking Syrians in;  students are bringing refugees in car trunks into the country [Germany]; activists are marrying foreigners to make permanent residency possible. Many Germans are further along in their minds and their hearts than elected officials and those who fill newspaper columns.”

It is heartening that there are so many individual acts of resistance. But there are limits to the effects individual acts of resistance can have. Intelligent policy choices can reach many more people and do so much faster than uncoordinated individuals. Yet, the response from the top seems to be to turn a deaf ear to the ways politicians’ own policies threaten their eventual undoing. The hopelessness that policies like detention and deportation have caused can lead directly to the radicalization of refugees, especially those held in detention or deported to large-scale camps without a path towards citizenship and work. A hopeless generation will merely add to the political destabilization of Europe and the Middle East – hardening refugees and producing images even harder for the EU to tolerate.

 

 

 

Mar 20 2016
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Europe, Turkey, UN

EU-Turkey Deal

On March 7, 2016, the EU Heads of State or Government met with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the deal reached with Turkey about ten days later.  The EU Council has published an English press release of the plan here. The initial paragraphs of this plan are already disappointing, and illustrate how shortsighted the plan is. In this document, which – if enacted – may change the European landscape in very radical ways, there is no mention of the causes of flight:

The Heads of State or Government agreed that bold moves were needed to close down people smuggling routes, to break up the business model of the smugglers, to protect our external borders and to end the migration crisis in Europe.  We need to break the link between getting in a boat and getting settlement in Europe.

It’s as if the flow of refugees were invisible until rubber boats materialized in a magical, wavy mirage on the Turkish coast.

There have been a lot of good articles which explain the details of this deal, so I won’t repeat that here.  The Guardian has a Q&A page that explains the agreement, and Matthias Krupa’s piece at ZEIT ONLINE does a good job of pragmatically assessing the consequences in German politics here. The criticism of this deal has also proliferated: see the remarks of the UN Human Rights Chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein in English and in German.

UN Human Rights Chief Hussein has been speaking out against inhuman treatment of refugees throughout the crisis. Back in February 2016, he expressed serious concern about the shifts in policing taking place in Austria, Croatia, Macedonia, Servia and Slovenia as these countries tried to limit entry to refugees crossing through their territory. He also accused these countries of “exacerbating ‘the chaos and misery all down the line’ and especially in Greece.”  What is a consistent argument against the plan is that this deal could break with the Geneva Convention and international human rights law – supposedly the bedrock of the European Union and protection against repeating the genocide of the Second World War. Günter Burkhardt, leader of ProAsyl (a German working group) wrote a strongly worded critique for the Frankfurter Rundschau pointing out that this deal also creates a heirarchy amongst those seeking refuge – placing Syrians above all other nationalities rather than hearing individual reasons for flight. ProAsyl is supporting refugees in Greece who want to press charges in court to have their cases heard.

While Greece – rightly so – figures prominently in the EU Heads of State plan, there is no discussion of the bloodshed and chaos causing people to flee. Furthermore, Turkey is – step-by-step, with each suicide bomber or crackdown on the freedom of the press – becoming more and more instable and autocratic. Even Horst Seehofer, right wing politician of the CSU, rejects the deal because of the concessions it makes to Turkey.

Back in November 2015, Thomas Assheuer wrote a visionary op-ed for Die Zeit called Our Culture of Welcoming (Unsere Wilkommenskultur).

What will be written in the history books about these days in October? Maybe “Europe’s Failure”? Temperatures are falling to freezing, and in Europe, thousands of refugees are sleeping outside, in the mud and cold, among them infants and children.

As spring comes, not much has changed.  In this essay, Assheuer recognizes that the flow of refugees appears as an “apocalyptic metaphor” of our present moment, which is built upon a modernity in which politics has collapsed because nation-states have become irrelevant in the face of the neoliberal global market:

The refugee is what remains after the destruction of political spaces: he is life laid bare in flight [das nackte Leben auf der Flucht].

Without the cover of deals, aid packages and political rhetoric, the essence of the refugee crisis has indeed been laid frighteningly bare: you are in need, but we will not help you. Assheuer continues:

You don’t need a lot of imagination to sketch out what happens when the flow of reguees doesn’t end, when cities and communities capitulate to the number of those seeking protection and the EU makes a solvable problem into an unsolveable one.

What will happen – as the recent successes of the AfD show – is that the political spectrum will jump to the right and Merkel (center right) “will suddenly stand there as a left-liberal European.” Assheuer predicts the return of authoritarian states 25 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: and the special forces soldiers from back then, he jokes, are still available for employment.

The Turkey-EU deal is evidence of Europe making a “solveable problem into an unsolveable one.” If member states had agreed to a distribution plan earlier, the pressure on Greece and other large receiving countries – like Germany and Sweden – would be less. One by one, European heads of state – the Faymanns and the Orbans – have clung to nationalist fantasies and left Merkel isolated as the only humanitarian. That position, Malte Lehming commented in Der Tagesspiegel – is one Merkel is slowly giving up. She has been pulled to the right, and perhaps supports the deal with Turkey not just because it was her idea, but because in this political climate, it may be the only alternative.

In Vienna yesterday, there were protests against the deal.

 

Mar 14 2016
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Europe, Migration, Politics, Refugees

Refugees defy limits at Greek/Macedonian Border

There are three events that are of massive importance right now in the interaction between right-wing populism, irregular migration and refugee rights.

First, the EU and Turkey are proposing a “one-in-one-out” deal that will involve a bizarre rearrangement of refugees being returned to Turkey as those in Turkish camps then get passage to Europe. The UN has called this deal illegal and in violation of European refugee law and rights.

Second, the state (provincial) elections in Germany on Super Sunday led the AfD to a huge win in three states: Baden-Württemburg, Sachsen-Anhalt and Rheinland-Pfalz. Sachsen-Anhalt saw the AfD win almost 25% of the vote. The AfD is quickly on its way to becoming a party of hate, with party positions formally against Muslims and LGBT people. The AfD and Donald Trump share rhetorical strategies.

Third, a thousand refugees – among many thousands trapped for days in Greece at the Macedonian border – have defied the border crossing and begun to reach Macedonia. There is amazing footage posted on YouTube from the town of Chamilo as people attempt to cross the river. It’s cold; three people have died trying to cross the river. It’s being called the #marchofhope. Macedonia is not a member of the EU. I am not sure of the legal ramifications for crossing from the EU (i.e., Greece) into a non-member state. *UPDATE 3/16/2016: It seems as if this crossing was primarily motivated by activists distributing leaflets in Arabic trying to convince people to risk their lives for a political statement. The Macedonian police simply held and then deported those who crossed.

Chaos breeds chaos; anxiety produces more anxiety. Where is the leadership whose values are rooted in common sense and a sense of humanitarian urgency?

Feb 22 2016
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National Identity, PEGIDA, Refugees, Terror, Uncategorized

Clausnitz

There’s a German idiom that may also be similar in British English, but it’s one I’ve never heard Americanized:

“Ich glaub’, ich bin im falschen Film.” Literally this means: I think I’m in the wrong movie. Figuratively, it means that something is out of place. Something went wrong, and you ended up on someone else’s movie set. You’re thinking to yourself, this can’t be happening. This is surreal.

Refugees arrived in the Saxon town of Clausnitz last Thursday, February 18th, late at night. Saxony is the province where PEGIDA was founded, and Clausnitz is right near the border to the Czech Republic. PEGIDA and their Czech counterparts (right-wing populists) have marched together during events held in Sebnitz, about an hour and a half away.

On Thursday, this video was posted to YouTube, which shows terrified refugees sobbing as they exit the bus to chants of “Wir sind das Volk! We are the people!” As Stefan Kuzmany wrote in Der Spiegel on Friday: these demonstrators are not das Volk:

You’re not the people. […]

You’re grown men who make children cry.

I post this video with reservation: the camera is focused on the refugees, but I really wish it were aimed at the demonstrators. They should not be allowed to remain anonymous; a faceless mob. That imbues them with power, and objectifies the refugees who are already nameless and faceless and invisible as individuals. According to the BBC, the state Interior Minister, Markus Ulbig, described [the situation] as “deeply shameful.” All the more reason to shame the perpetrators through identification – rather than the victims.

As this story has developed, some troubling events have come to light. As the SZ reported, the manager of the asylum home is a man aptly named Thomas Hetze, a member of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) Party. He holds what they call “a questionable worldview.” I’ll say. Hetze has publicly hetzte (incited) citizens at events where he’s spoken out against “asylchaos” or “refugee chaos.” Despite his political attitudes, the government office responsible for staffing his position says he can stay:

“As long as he doesn’t break the law, there’s no problem,” says Diester Steiner from the government office of the county (Asylstab). That Hetze applied for this job despite his political convictions shows that he has a good attitude.” (SZ)

This comment itself is surreal. Hetze, with his political ties, seems to have informed others about the arrival and created this PR and humanitarian disaster. According to the MDR, Hetze’s brother was part of the group organizing the mob. I’ve seen tweets implying that Hetze himself was one of only a few people who knew the refugees would be coming. Nighttime arrivals seem to be common practice, perhaps to avoid precisely this kind of politicization. With right-wing violence high in this area, and asylum homes being burned down with impunity as a method of protest, political orientations matter because some of them in this day and age are violent. Humans are social creatures. Our networks may not predict, but they surely influence, our actions.

Even more embarrassing are the comments of the President of the Chemnitz Police, Uwe Reißmann, who defended the actions of the police on that evening and declared at a press conference that refugees would be charged with provocation for filming. One ten year old boy  gave protestors the middle finger as he was dragged crying off the bus, and through the mob into the building designated for housing. That, apparently, was a provocation. Being verbally assaulted by an angry mob? That was a situation that was “unpredictable” and “impossible to contain.” The federal minister of the interior, Thomas de Maziere, defended Reißmann’s actions on Sunday evening on the ARD network:  “I can’t think of any criticism of this police engagement.”

I think I’m in the wrong movie.

 

Update: 2/22/2016 8:45am EST: According to this article in Stern, Hetze has been removed from his post – for his own protection.

 

 

Feb 04 2016
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AfD, Germany, Politics

Beware the Alternatives

In the two-party governance system of the United States, graphs like these may seem confusing:

The state news channel ARD tweeted the results of an election poll yesterday with six viable parties, and another column in grey for all the rest. The Christian Democrats, Merkel’s party, lead with 35% of voters; followed by the moderate Social Democrats with 24%. Two left-wing parties, the Left and the Greens, have about 10% each. The neo-liberal Free Democratic Party is barely making the 5% threshold required to enter parliament. Then there’s the shocker: the far-right, nationalistic party called Alternative for Germany is pulling in a whopping 12%. According to the tweet under the image, it seems like AfD is mostly gaining voters who previously voted for the center-right Christian Democrats.

If you want to understand German politics right now, the AfD is probably the most prescient indicator of how the political mood in Germany is changing.

What’s also very important to understand is that this sea change has been gradual, and been in motion for much longer than the refugee crisis. AfD was founded in 2012 and first appeared in the 2013 federal elections, where they ran primarily on a platform of Euro-scepticism. The “Alternative” in their party name is understood as desiring a political alternative to the European Union and shared currency. They are doing well because Europe has started to teeter on the edge of political and economic collapse by being embroiled in two crises: one, the Greek economic crisis, and two, the refugee crisis. They are also doing well because they have managed, as a party, to oust all of their center-right founders. The far-right has taken control of the party.

Which brings me to the initial purpose of this post: the AfD has recently made some terrifying statements that can only be described as morally corrupt. Both the chairwoman of the party, Frauke Petry, and her representative, Beatrix von Storch, called for border guards to shoot refugees as a solution to the crisis in late January.  Von Storch was nothing less than clear in this FaceBook comments thread:

Hans Werner: That’s ridiculous. Are you going to limit access of women with children on the green meadows [border landscape] with armed force?

Beatrix von Storch: Yes.

Katharina König: Shoot at children? Beatrix von Storch, #AfD says “Yes” Does anyone else have questions about this party? #coldcountry

There has been a massive amount of press attention to these statements, as there well should be. Petry and von Storch are trying to distance themselves from their PR disaster, with little success. And yet – for those voters AfD continues to poach from moderate right parties – these statements clearly have appeal. The AfD is becoming the party PEGIDA is legally prevented from becoming. On the rest of the political spectrum – including the centrist and left-wing parties – there must be some serious scrambling going on to find alternatives to the Alternativ.

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