Germany has recently taken a chilling new step, signalling its willingness to use political views as grounds to curb migration. Authorities are now moving to deport foreign nationals for participating in pro-Palestine actions. As I reported this week in the Intercept, four people in Berlin – three EU citizens and one US citizen – are set to be deported over their involvement in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. None of the four have been convicted of a crime, and yet the authorities are seeking to simply throw them out of the country.
The accusations against them include aggravated breach of the peace and obstruction of a police arrest. Reports from last year suggest that one of the actions they were alleged to have been involved in included breaking into a university building and threatening people with objects that could have been used as potential weapons.
But the deportation orders go further. They cite a broader list of alleged behaviours: chanting slogans such as “Free Gaza” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, joining road blockades (a tactic frequently used by climate activists), and calling a police officer a “fascist”. Read closely, the real charge appears to be something more basic: protest itself.
I’m sorry, but I used to think exactly like you many years ago.
Most German remembrance culture is overly superficial. Many German politicians hold straight up nazi views and they’re still mingling around in the Bundestag. Some of them were caught on audio saying nazi shit. Others were involved with nazi organisations as youngsters. Many of them still attend “secret” nazi meetings and they’re still mingling around with other politicians, even when it gets out to the press. Many of them hold up antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. views and they’re still in positions of power. Most german billionaires have built their empires on top of the Holocaust. They’re still around. No one dares to touch them. There’s just some superficial “public outrage” from time to time and then the wheels of history just keep chugging on. Where’s the remembrance culture for the millions of victims, most jewish, many queer, and political victims of the nazi regime?
Where was the remembrance culture for so many decades for the tens of thousands of queer victims of the Holocaust? Germany barely managed to pass a same-sex marriage bill a few years ago. Hell, even the US has done it before Germany did and they didn’t have any concentration camps filled with homosexuals. So where’s the remembrance culture?
Where’s the human dignity when the greens and the social democrats are deporting people to Afghanistan, a country ruled by the taliban? Where’s the human dignity when minorities are often the ones to get the short end of the stick at every interaction with state institutions? Where’s the human dignity when minorities die in police custody and nothing ever comes out of it? Or when cops are involved en masse with nazi organisations? Where’s the human dignity when people go out to protest and they get massively suppressed by police, often with liberal newspapers cheering it on?
It doesn’t need to get to an industrialised killing of a group of people to be able to talk about “nazi like mentality”.
Germany is more than happy to revoke citizenships nowadays for saying things the German state doesn’t like. This is something unseen since nazi times. This is creating first and second class German citizens. Are you a so-called “bio deutsche”? Then you’re free to do nazi shit, scream your hate-speech at immigrants, you’ll mostly just get a fine and that’s the end of the story. Are you a german with a second citizenship? Then go against the so called Staatsräson, criticise Israel publicly, and you’ll have the entire might of the German state weighing down on you, having your citizenship revoked and ending up being deported. For a thought crime.
You either stay in line, or you’re out of here, unworthy of being a citizen of this state just because you hold a different opinion.
And the thing about making parties illegal. That’s hilarious. The AfD is saying shit nowadays that other parties ten/twenty years ago have gotten banned for. And they’re doing it openly. And growing bolder, while the german society just stands there and looks.
Where is the human dignity when Germany makes a shitton of money by selling weapons that end up being used on fucking kids in Gaza? Where was the human dignity when Germany sold Saddam Hussein all the infrastructure he needed to build chemical weapons? Where was the love for law when the German chancellor ruled out an arrest for Netanyahu even though he has an international warrant?
When you answer all of those questions, then you’ll know exactly how much Germany, as a state, cares about its own constitution. And yet the german people still follow the state’s line. And that’s all you need to know for the future.
I don’t think we disagree on these points. I’ll reply to more of your arguments once I have the time, but for now the main question I was asking myself was: How can we at the same time do our duty to Isreal as remembrance of the Holocaust, and actively oppose what Israel does right now? We would have to cross the line, and actually say things that everyone says we shouldn’t because of our history. My personal view is that our debts are paid, and we should go back to just rationally follow international law again. But it’s not an easy situation for our politicians, because most of the world still expects us to essentially not do that. What do you think could be the solution? In my opinion, essentially Germany has to emancipate it from its “Urschuld”