The following essay was written by a Bavarian nationalist — I can’t think of a more appropriate term to describe his cultural and political point of view — named Don Alphonso. The writer discusses recent complaints by leftists against the Cologne police over the strict law enforcement techniques used on New Year’s Eve.

JLH, who translated the essay, includes this prefatory note:

This piece comes from the same Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that once published an anti-PEGIDA editorial, making fun of Dresden as the hick city that gave the movement a home. This writer casually and consistently uses the term “Nafris” which promises to become the “acceptable N-word” for Arab Muslim interlopers. He also emphasizes his regional and dialect background as a reminder that he is one of the “natives” who are being pushed around.

The translated article from the FAZ:

Not a Homeland for Nafrional Socialists

by Don Alphonso
January4, 2017

The door that affords admission to good people and bad people alike is a poor door
— African proverb

You know, it’s not easy for a historian to deal with Germany as a nation. The borders of the country in which we live are about 25 years old. The Germany of 1871, on the other hand, lies today in Poland, France and Russia; and no doubt the Italians who are running the restaurant on the Wendelstein^[1] are not really so much Italian as German. They are from South Tyrol, where it is easy to meet someone who had Italian in school, but understands even less than I do — and I am really bad at it.

This is because cultural areas are a different thing than nations. Nations are defined by borders and laws. Cultural areas are historically more stable. Changing cultural regions rather than borders can get ugly. Genocide and cleansing are the means used more often than the vote, as could be seen in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. So, for a historian and a lover of mankind, working with cultural areas is more enjoyable than studying nations.

One such region is the Alps. Even with all the intra-alpine diversity and stubborn independence, there is a certain inner likeness. In the past year, I had to decline a schnapps from Slovenia to Graubünden [Switzerland], from Gmund [Bavaria] to Riva [Italy], in churches and inns, on lakes and in [mountain] passes.

There is a very banal but appropriate saying in Bavaria, Hockts eich hera, samma mehra. Have a seat, then there will be more of us. There is a great openness implicit in this phrasing, but also an enormous obligation to fit in with a collective. In practice, this will not please every modern person, but table groups, travel groups, mountain climbing teams and cycling clubs are formed, because it’s easier to do things together in the mountains, so long as nobody gets out of line. For that, there is the saying hock di hi und sei stad, [take your place here and hold steady] which can be taken as encouragement to put an effort into assimilation. Mountains were and are, as ever. a force for obligation, which compresses people — I laugh about it now and then, when literally everyone I meet in the gathering dusk wants to get me into a safe and secure shelter. But that’s how it is in this cultural area. Or, as it is also known — home.

Combining overly different cultures in one nation requires an instinct and understanding for the concerns of others, if it is not to end in a failed state that will unravel along the borders of the cultural areas. There was a relatively harmless instance of that last year with the EU and Brexit. To put it another way, nations are more acceptable if they respect the characteristics of the homeland and do not attempt to delegitimize those sensitivities. For instance, if I wanted to decree that every racer in Berlin gets a big BMW and free gas, and to finance this the force feeding of the entire population should come from the cheapest factory farms, using genetically modified animals, the Green citizenry would be horrified, even though this may actually be close to present reality. People in this land of commuters with freak weather would be just as horrified at ideas like €5 per liter of gas, slowing down, and tax-supported Veggie Days. And those parties, as well, who would like an Early-Volker-Beckicization^[2] in the schools, should not roll their eyes if the songs of my homeland await them with a late-blooming, but sexualized conception of the role of women. That’s how we roll.

Our tradition of climbing into a sweetheart’s window notwithstanding, most of us understood instinctively that New Year’s Eve 2015/2016 in Cologne was in no way a form of immigration or refuge-seeking, but was a hostile invasion. It was — you guessed it, feminists like Margarete Stokowski, who just today in Spiegel is criticizing the police — who have attempted to brandish the Oktoberfest Lie^[3] as a counter. There was a movement to re-define the invasive, criminal acts as the result of a masculine patriarchal problem. The initiative was called “Without Exception,” was blared abroad by the media, supported by Heiko Maas and Manuela Schwesig^[4] and endorsed by feminist anti-Semites and friends of Islamic Hamas. Everything was OK; no one was too mean or low when it came to pointing out the obvious. In Cologne, civil order broke down, the law of violence prevailed and criminal invaders from abroad had control of the belongings and bodies of German citizens. Subsequently the state was shockingly incapable of finding these criminals, trying and deporting them. No politician assumed responsibility and resigned. That was all.

Security is very important in my cultural area. Precisely because it was not God-given in the mountains, people have been happy to become accustomed to this luxury, and definitely want to keep it. Security is to great extent the normal for us, so Cologne was a real shock. That was no temporary constriction of security — it was a thorough failure. I know of no one among us who finds this tolerable or comprehensible. It may happen that a terrorist evades surveillance. It is difficult to prevent a gang of seven from setting a homeless person on fire and smirking at the camera. But great mobs of dangerous elements coming together are manageable. The police have water cannons, truncheons, live ammunition, guns, tear gas and regulations on how to use them — from harmless to emphatic to state-sanctioned force.

That worked in Cologne this time, from the point of view of my culture. And, to be sure, without the water cannon driving right into the crowd, or certain other things which are hinted at when criminal Nafri gangs get the worst of it in Italy. It is undisputed that there are many basic principals that must be weighed against one another — no different with Nafris than with freedom of expression. If I were to write about what rights we would care to guarantee risk groups in Cologne, I wouldn’t need a lot of space. I could leave it at “as little as possible.” The actual result — a mild confrontation with a few instances of “move along and don’t come back” — accords with present ideas of de-escalation. It is true that the constitution forbids discrimination by the state, but it has also never allowed for hundreds of menacing individuals to wander unsupervised among peace-loving people. If there was damage to the constitution, then it happened a year ago on New Year’s Eve. Politicians and media who chose to retroactively whitewash the events of a year ago are now the first to criticize the police. At the time, Mrs. Stokowski wrote in Spiegel Online, “Good German men are always prepared to harass their own women.”

In my cultural group, there is strong doubt that leftist totalitarians, juridically challenged ideologues or anti-German racists such people ought to take over the guidance of justice in Cologne, since they are usually in opposition to the state and its boundaries, and now want the constitution to give preference to Nafris. Besides, the Greens, together with the other parties in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia), used this idea in instituting the Committee of Inquiry. So why should we not stay with it and expand the idea to include the socialist idolaters and helpers of the Nafris. What happened in Cologne — from the point of view of my cultural homeland — was something like a first, small step away from the feeling that we are living as aliens in our own land. Cologne 2015 was the beginning of a year of alienation. This time, at least, we saw that the worst can be prevented, even if the miscreants are still visibly among us. It was a turning point. And then politicians like Christopher Lauer of the SPD, Simone Peter of the Greens and others step up and try to start a debate about discrimination. From the point of view of my cultural group, the police did what was necessary to impose order. There is still a long way to go to establish security. At the very least, New Year’s Eve in Cologne worked out, thanks to a martial showing. And now the socialist Nafri apologists come along, talking about racism and trying to discredit the process. That is their constitutional right. But this kind of behavior not only insults the people who put themselves on the line. It also shows last year’s victims that there are those who are prepared to worry about the rights of the aggressive Nafris, while these same people tried for weeks and months to whitewash and misinterpret the crimes of a year ago. And it becomes apparent in my cultural group that the way back to security lies not only in opposition to the Nafris, but also to their friends.

Nafri supporters tend to call this opposition a shift to the right. But where I come from, this is not occasion for a debate on the rights of Nafris and the moral superiority of the Nafrional Socialists whose anti-German reflex reaction has been to shout “racism.” That’s not all. Then comes the debate about whether, in the context of laws pertaining to foreigners and of regional structures, complaining about welfare recipients and cost to the public is not restricting space for such people as much as possible, and tending toward the lower limits of the Geneva Refugee Accord — if one or another welfare recipient is insulted and forced to sue at the expense of the general public.

And then the debate about allowing the police the use of their deployments to their constitutional limit. And when the complaining continues, my cultural circle wonders whether it is worth continuing to live in a place whose politicians and media tolerate hindering the rule of law and opposing its citizens and their interests. Maybe it’s OK in Berlin to consume crystal meth, regard the organized drug mafia as partners, and leave the police out in the cold. But broad swathes of this land have other ideas, a different relationship to the executive, and are not prepared to surrender their homeland and their values to the law-of-the-jungle criminal element outgrowths of brazen, Islamic demands stemming from Turkey. That is the core of the conflict. They believe their idea of life is correct and are in no mood for debates about child marriage, sharia and hordes drunk on their constitutional rights. They just don’t want it.

It may be that some cultural areas will allow that to reach the point of bending the law, and others will fight it with all available means. If it is not even possible to achieve unity about the confrontation in Cologne, then it won’t happen. Then that is the dividing line between cultural areas. One cultural region will ruthlessly send the water cannons, the other will mothball them. The Nafris are neoliberal, and go where the police are not heroic when they uphold the law. That is not the Germany we used to know, but a dis-unified legal and cultural area with regional peculiarities and travelers’ advisories. If it were really about integration of immigrants, togetherness and agreement on the indispensable limits of our legal state, so that immigrants could behave according to the Geneva Convention and thus be happily accepted, then the advocates of immigration should be thankful for the police action on New Year’s Eve 2016. The result could perhaps have been merchandized among us as a kind of holding-together: Look, it’s getting better, we are doing something. And to the immigrants: Look, we are upholding the boundaries.

That could have led to healing. But that was not desired, and I doubt that Mrs. Peter or Mr. Lauer would be welcome guests in my cultural area. As last year is re-interpreted with all possible vigor, so the new victims shall become the perpetrators. My cultural group may not have great influence on the leading media, but it has brains, torches, muzzle-loaders, money — lots of it, and pitchforks. Some people get a good schnapps here, others get a really good chance to integrate by way of work, and others — how shall I say it — in Bavaria we say an Dreg im Schachterl. [come up empty] That would not be the desired outcome in a construct like the Federal Republic of Germany, but it amounts to a hard separation and difficult struggles to accomplish it.

Anyway, anyone who wants to do something for women, female immigrants and constitutional rights should become involved with the so-called prostitution protection law, its severe intrusions into personal freedom and the state’s surveillance powers. That is truly difficult, and it is about more than just police supervision, which can be evaded, unless you run straight into it.

Notes: