Below is the first part of a two-part essay by Hans-Peter Raddatz about the AfD (Alternative for Germany). Rembrandt Clancy has translated the piece, and includes an introduction and extensive endnotes.

Question on Fundamental Principles to the Alternative für Deutschland Party (Part 1)

Are the AfD Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

About the Author

Dr. Hans Peter Raddatz counts, along with Dr. Tilman Nagel, as one of the most prolific specialists in Middle Eastern and Oriental studies in Germany (PI-News). He is also an economist, consultant and writer. After being active for many years representing the interests of international banks in the Near East, he wrote numerous books on the fundamentals of globalisation, Islam and the Islamisation of the West. He has made contributions to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and has translated Bat Ye’or’s Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, providing it with a commentary.

Introduction

by Rembrandt Clancy

Can the AfD constitute an alternative for Germany by continuing to work within the current socio-political “system” outside of which “there is no alternative” (Merkel)? In Part 1 of this two-part contribution, Dr. Raddatz describes the political, constitutional and journalistic-propaganda pressures affecting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as it attempts to work from within the “system”, by which is meant an increasingly centralised and totalised (totalisiert) five-party political structure which works in unison on policy and controls the main institutions of society.

Since the five political parties agree on central policies such as open borders, Islamisation, the EU and globalisation, they are often referred to as the “Uni-Party” (Einheitspartei) or even more pejoratively, the Parteienkartell. The Uni-Party is made up of Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD), the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens and the Left Party (Die Linke).

The AfD, for their part, have seriously addressed Islamisation and open borders for only about the last two years of their five-year history. In the federal election of September of 2017, the AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time with 94 seats, having first achieved representation in 14 of the 16 state legislatures. Under the combined chairmanship of Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, the party appears to be breaking the monopoly of the Uni-Party in the Bundestag, at least when it comes to speeches.

In the second paragraph of this essay a central concept emerges which may appear ambiguous to some who are unfamiliar with German political language. Dr. Raddatz quotes Alexander Gauland as announcing the AfD’s intention of ‘driving the political class ahead of them’ (vor sich hertreiben). This phrasing is not uncommon among lobby groups, NGOs and opposition parties, who sometimes use it to express their intention of pressuring a government into doing their bidding. In this case, Dr. Gauland does not apply it specifically to a government, but to the “political class” as a whole in their embodiment as “consensus parties” (Gauland). The expression therefore carries the implication that the AfD will have some success in bringing the “subversive strategy” of the ruling class around to the AfD’s “concept of the common good”.

Dr. Raddatz addresses the question of how this expectation is to be fulfilled as the AfD continues to work within an increasingly “totalised” system, rather than from an independent metapolitical alternative, namely, with a “forum” of their own and with the “strengths of the entire country”. The reader may be interested in Endnote 1, which also documents a limited sense in which it may be plausible for the AfD to ‘drive the political class ahead of them’ and its differential plausibility for success when applied by factions within the Uni-Party itself.

To describe this situation of totalisation, Dr. Raddatz draws on the concept of Gleichschaltung, which is of National Socialist provenance. This concept, which has become a foreign loan word in English, describes an enforced shifting or levelling down of all major political, social and cultural institutions to the same (gleich) ideological standard of thought and behaviour (Duden).

Are the AfD Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

by Hans-Peter Raddatz
3 March 2018

Translation by Rembrandt Clancy

Original German Language Source: PI-News

Those who wish to reactivate the democratic rules of the game, which the political groups of the Uni-Party in black-red-yellow-green (CDU-SPD-FDP-Greens-Linke) have displaced, have been entertaining hopes, while frontline people in the AfD, such as Beatrix von Storch and Gottfried Curio, have been turning to Parliament and forcing the unity commissars, who call themselves “parliamentary representatives”, to write their years-long catalogue of accumulated sins into the family album.

If an “alternative for Germany” is to be derived from this, however, it will require the alternative strengths of the entire country, because the Uni-Party controls the “Parliament” and the major institutions of the media, education, justice, and the churches. It is true that AfD Chairman Alexander Gauland announced the party’s intention to “drive” the political class “ahead of them”,^[1] but he failed to take into account that there is (still) no forum for that.

For the arguments raised in the Bundestag and also in several state parliaments, as plausible as they may be, are muffled in the din of the day, because “Parliament” has degenerated into the Central Committee and the institutions into mob-cadres, which under the wilting fig leaves of “democracy” and “liberality”, have long since set up a dictatorship of forced tolerance. Whoever does not follow it; for example, those who reject the orgies of violence of the Islamic invasion are “inciters of the people” [Volksverhetzer], “racists” or worse, hence they manifest wicked attributes which “incite” the people into voting for the AfD.

This fuels the propaganda, which heaps hysterical defamations on the AfD representatives and perpetuates a proven pattern which expedites the dispossession of “those who have been living here longer”^[2] and advances the rulers’ wished-for ruination of the country. That such has been the declared strategy of the political class since the 1970s can be gleaned from the critical literature relating to the reasons behind the current radicalisation (von Arnim, Raddatz, Bat Ye’or etc.).

Now as is well known, it has been stereotypically preached from the Chancellor-pulpit (Kanzler-Kanzel) that there is “no alternative”, which should give the Alternative für Deutschland pause for thought, because there is (still) no alternative to the radicalised “Parliament” of the neo-dictatorship. Its subversive strategy stands opposed to the AfD’s concept of the common good, and is, on the contrary, suited to turn the tables and “drive” the AfD “ahead of it”. Thus it is questionable from a constitutional standpoint whether this constellation of the AfD can supply a compatible, let alone a competent platform for debate, particularly since the part of the German Criminal Code regulating incitement to hatred^[3] is among those sections, which, over the last three decades — naturally bypassing the public — have often been changed after the manner of the flexible criteria of the unemployment statistics.

Reasons for this doubt fill entire books, and not only those of the aforementioned authors. They also engage experts in constitutional law such as K. A. Schachtschneider and Josef Isensee, on whom the far-reaching decline in the administration of justice and political hygiene has not been lost. The most recent practical example was the AfD motion to disapprove the statements of the “German journalist” Deniz Yücel,^[4] who among others in 2011 came up with a pithy saying: “The early demise of the Germans is the dying-out of a people at its most beautiful” (see below).

The choleric reaction of the “Parliament” offered a selection from their defamation-potential, which the neo-dictatorial mob-cadres reflexively utter whenever things run against their unity line. In this respect, Alice Weidel’s comment that Yücel is “neither a journalist nor a German” was anything but “nonsense” (Michael Stifter), rather it was misleadingly abridged.^[5] Missing is the important addition that Yücel is only nominally a journalist and a German because he, like countless other freeloaders with “background”-qualities, in addition to their hatred for Germans, can be useful to the state-subversive system, therefore making him a passport-German and a formal-journalist.

For a long time now, this has been forming an institutional pattern, in that politicians, foundations, universities, the justice system and the churches etc. have been hauling “background”-activists with unsuitable field-qualifications into ever higher ranks, thereby believing they have come closer to the ostensibly pluralistic ideal of social Gleichschaltung. Such can be observed in any of the Uni-Party comrades. Ready to hand are AfD-critics such as the liberal Wolfgang Kubicki [vice chairman of the FDP] and Cem Özdemir of the Greens. Although as lawyer and kindergarten teacher respectively they are quite differentially qualified, both are committed to the anti-German [Volkfeindlich] stupid-line, which compels them to dispute the intellectuality of the “right-wing populist” AfD (Kubicki) or to deny the Gleichschaltung outright (Özdemir).

In this way scepticism can become more intense, which gives rise to the expectation of the next phase on the way to another totalitarianism predicted by the present writer.^[6] It consists in declaring a state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand), which the politico-social class controls, because they themselves are provoking resistance against the dispossession of the citizens through mega-immigration (soon family reunification); and, with an “eye to the Right”, they determine when the time is right for activation of the emergency law and when the official dictatorship is to come into force in a completely “democratic” way.

Throughout the long-term dissolution of the state, which over the years the Valium pill of the “conspiracy theory” has successfully protected against criticism, it has been standard procedure to let loose trial balloons on the people in order to test their mental alertness and their physical or financial resilience. In the still ongoing monster test of mega-immigration, the cue-word “Ausnahmezustand“ [state of emergency] appeared apparently inconspicuously, but appropriately (because it is a mediocre publication) in Zeit Online (22 February 2018). It is hypocritically explained there, that the “constitutional state” is presently becoming frayed, and the authorities, on the grounds of sheer overloading, are unable to fulfil their tasks of internal and external security — without mentioning, however, who the “leaders” [Führer] of the out-of-control state actually are.

Zeit-Online had earlier proven its appropriateness for radical forums, among them being that of the German-Kurdish journalist Mely Kiyak, whom organs of opinion preferentially book and who can pass for a female version of Yücel.^[7] After the speech by the impaired Thilo Sarrazin, who is known as a critic of Islamic intelligence, underwent a tumour operation, she characterised him as a “lisping, stuttering, twitching caricature of a man”, and she plodded away against the AfD protests in Clausnitz (February 2016) which had been organised to oppose the local mass arrival of “refugees”. She proved herself thereby to have an appropriately radical system-view, on which the vast majority of “culture dialogues” remained rather approvingly silent. She stated that when the citizens, who should have no right to protest, claim the right to do so, they must be considered an “uninhibited and unfettered mob” against which the artillery of the emergency law is to be brought up.^[8] It goes without saying that only people “with background” get away with racist perceptions of this kind; not, however, indigenous “human caricatures”, which also makes Yücel’s vision of the dying-out of the indigenous people appear all the more “justified”.

That such situations are by and large supported by the government, and that the AfD is of course to be held responsible for “incitement to hatred” and “racism”, require no special mention, such that even one of Alexander Dobrindt’s (CSU) “feelings” appears almost self-evident. According to him, “we shall find reasons in the following weeks and months, which make possible a justification for placing persons in the AfD under observation…”.^[9] Elections set for the fall in Bavaria will determine the fate of the CSU; they burden Minister-President-designate Söder with an “Islam belongs to Bavaria” comment and they occasion anxiety about a further strengthening of the AfD, to the extent that one could “feel” compelled to more robust measures of despotism.

To that is added the anxiety of the rulers over losing their officially guaranteed self-service and corruption, which can compel them, or the willing Constitutional Court (Verfassungsgericht),^[10] to the “alternative” of drying up the AfD after the pattern of the NPD [National Democratic Party] by virtue of terminating the state financing of the party;^[11] or alternatively, by “cultivating” their compliance in such a way that they accommodate to the rules and become a junior party to the Uni-Party. None of this is speculation, but is common unity-praxis, which until now has taken down every emergent competition which is democratic or in the interests of Germans as a people [Volksfreundlich] (von Arnim).^[12]

Translator’s Endnotes

1. “while the AfD Chairman, Alexander Gauland, announced the intention of ‘driving’ the political class ‘in ahead of us’ (vor uns hertreiben)…”: Just prior to the federal election in September of 2017, Dr. Alexander Gauland closed a speech he gave in Magdeburg with such a statement (cf. “ We are Defending our Constitution “, video: 11:48 min.).

Sara Wagenknecht in 2013 used the expression to express the intention of pressuring those Uni-Party factions forming the government to stay on the same page as her own “opposition” party, Die Linke:

“We are going to drive the government ahead us and we shall continually confront the participating parties with their election promises” (Wir werden die Regierung vor uns hertreiben…). (Schwäbischen Zeitung, 21 Oct. 2013)

Since all the Uni-Party factions are Left, they already own the metapolitical space. That leftist parties have been successful in ‘driving traditional parties ahead of them’ is of course a familiar situation in many Western countries.

From the standpoint of the AfD, Dr. Maximilian Krah, an AfD spokesman, explained the plausibility of driving the government parties ahead of them in an RT interview he gave in September of 2017 on the occasion of the recent German federal elections (Emphasis added):

That is a big misunderstanding [that the AfD will be a hopeless minority in the Bundestag] because what is the CDU and the SPD bringing together? [sic] It is that they have the expectation to get jobs. And as long as Merkel and Schulz cannot guarantee jobs any more for their party members, they come into deep problems and they are forced to change their policy. So if you have 14% of AfD in, and both big parties losing seats, you make a lot of […] a lot of pressure on the party leaders of the large parties to change their politics. So it’s very important that you take them away jobs [take their jobs away] because that’s what they guarantee their members. And that’s the big message from today [the September 2017 federal election], that they don’t guarantee their jobs any more. (cf. Maximilian Krah: “Why is Merkel Opening the Borders Anyway?” Gates of Vienna.)

However, Maximilian Krah, also in “Why is Merkel Opening the Borders Anyway?” also speaks of re-establishing a cultural infrastructure among the people if the AfD is to survive over the long term.

2. “those who have been living here longer”:

Chancellor Merkel has been referring to native Germans as die schon hier länger Lebenden; literally, “the-already-living-here-longer”. The noun phrase is widely quoted with irony because of its ideologically loaded implication, which demotes indigenous Germans from an historically and culturally coherent Volk to a population (Bevölkerung) indistinguishable from foreigners except for where they happen to reside at any given moment. Also by implication, it demotes Germany to a territory or region within a larger globalised superstate.

However, the exception proves the rule. In her recent speech “Government Declaration” (Bundeserklärung, 21 March 2018), Frau Merkel once more used the term “Germans”, once. Alexander Gauland attributes this change to “the success of the AfD” (PI News 21 March 2018). Actually her precise expression was “indigenous Germans” (die einheimischen Deutschen). But this concession is more than compensated for when at the end of the same speech the Chancellor says that “Germany can do it” and adds, “We are all Germany.”

3. “particularly since the part of the German Criminal Code regulating incitement to hatred is among those sections which over the last three decades … have often been changed….”:

The significance of these changes lies in the gradual broadening of liability attached to section 130 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch (StGB)).

In the Imperial period, going back to 1872, section 130 appears to have been designed as an anti-Communist prohibition against incitement of class strife. Beginning in 1960, however, the focus of the section shifted from “classes of the population” to the multiculturally oriented “segments of the population”. However, the subjective concept of “hatred” was not introduced until 1969 when it was given the title “Incitement to Hatred”. Since 1960 there have been eight revisions. For the history of changes to Section 130 see Gates of Vienna: “Caution: ‘Incitement to Hatred’! The Juridical Cudgel” (4 January 2018) by Manfred Klein-Hartlage.

4. “The most recent practical example was the AfD motion to disapprove the statements of the “German journalist” Deniz Yücel”:

Deniz Yücel is a journalist (Die Welt) of Turkish extraction, who was born in Germany and has duel citizenship. After sitting over a year in a Turkish prison on charges of espionage, he was released on 16 February 2016. The motion by Gottfried Curio on behalf of the AfD of 21 February 2018 to censure Yücel for his statement about the Germans was defeated in the Bundestag 552 to 77 with one abstention (Deutscher Bundestag).

5. “Alice Weidel’s comment that [Deniz] Yücel is ‘neither a journalist nor a German’ was anything but ‘nonsense’ (Michael Stifter), rather it was misleadingly abridged”.

Alice Weidel has been Co-Chairman of the AfD in the Bundestag since the federal election in September of 2017. Her statement about Deniz Yücel, who has a Turkish “background”, appears on her Twitter account and Facebook page. The Facebook entry of 17 February 2017 is highlighted with an image containing the inscription:

“Fake news: Yücel is neither a journalist nor a German!”

Deniz Yücel:

“German journalist” is set free [from a Turkish prison]: two fake news items in two words!

Deniz Yücel, so called journalist and holder of a duel citizenship, dominates the headlines. Or better: his release from a Turkish prison in which he was incarcerated as a Turkish citizen…

Anyone who wishes Thilo Sarrazin a second stroke so that the latter “carry out his work more thoroughly” is no journalist. In another article in the TAZ he rejoiced over the “demise of the Germans”, which would be made possible through immigrants. Therefore, when the media today report that the “German journalist” Yücel has been set free, then that is equal to two fake news items in one sentence. To characterise the anti-German hate preacher as a journalist is absolutely grotesque.

Update: According to original reports, Yücel was flown in by government aircraft. In the meantime, that has been denied by “Die Welt”, which claims they chartered the said aircraft.

Michael Stifter, whom Dr. Raddatz sources as referring to Alice Weidel’s comment as “nonsense”, is a journalist. He made his comment in a German-language article for the Augsburger Allgemeine entitled “ Is Deniz Yücel an ‘Anti-German Hate Preacher? ‘“

6. “…a next phase on the way to another totalitarianism predicted by the present writer….”

One such reference can be found in Globalisation as War Against Man, Part 1 (Gates of Vienna) by Hans-Peter Raddatz, 14 September 2015:

The dehumanising consequences of this discrepancy [between differentiated thinking and today’s deratiocination (Denkschwund] are recognisable precisely in the mass murders of the modern age. After the Holodomor against the Russians and the Kulaks, the Holocaust against the Jews and the completion of the Islamic genocide against the Christians, and given the mass immigration into Europe, a totalitarian development is in preparation for which history knows no precedent.

7. “Mely Kiyak, … can pass for a female version of Yücel”:

Like Deniz Yücel, Mely Kiyak was born in Germany to Turkish immigrants who were part of the German guest worker (Gastarbeiter) programme (1950s to 1970s). Also like Yücel, Kiyak launched the public and personal attack against Thilo Sarrazin which Dr. Raddatz mentions. Sarrazin is the author of the now well-known book Deutschland schafft sich ab (2010) or “Germany is Abolishing Herself” in which the author criticises Islamic intelligence.

8. Mely Kiyak: “citizens, who should have no right to protest, … must be considered an “uninhibited and unfettered mob…. “.

The daughter of a Turkish immigrant (cf. Endnote 7), Mely Kiyak, wrote an article in Zeit Online (24 February 2018) opposing a demonstration by 100 local citizens of Clausnitz (a region of Saxony), who on 18 February 2016 had blocked a bus transporting “refugees” to an asylum centre (cf. PI News, video). Police forcefully removed one disruptive occupant from the bus, an action which later gave rise to accusations in the press against the police. In her article, Kiyak recommended implementation of the emergency law and opined that the telephone lines of Pegida demonstrators should be tapped.

9. “we shall find reasons in the following weeks and months, which make possible a justification for placing persons in the AfD under observation…”:

Statements of this type may be an ideological first step, perhaps a “trial balloon”, pointing to the taking down of the AfD, perhaps by withdrawing government financial support (see endnote 10).

Alexander Dobrindt is the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) party, sister party to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CSU) in the Bundestag.

Placement of the AfD under observation refers to monitoring of the party by the intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) 27 February 2018). As a possible example of a “trial balloon”, the FAZ advocates the official monitoring of AfD members with the following commentary:

It has to do with people in parts of the AfD leadership who have formulated utterances which stretch the boundaries of legality and have done so with “brutal tastelessness”. The secret service monitors activities which could endanger the constitutionally established liberal order in Germany.

The AfD is hoping to gain seats in parliament in the Bavarian state elections in the fall. The CSU are declared opponents of the right-wing populists and wish to prevent a party to its right from establishing itself in parliament. “I see myself with the task of doing everything in my power to ensure that the AfD disappears again from the German Bundestag”, said Dobrindt. Also the SPD has the joint responsibility.

10. the Constitutional Court: “compel [the rulers], or the willing Constitutional Court to the alternative of drying up the AfD…”

Don’t forget that every constitutional judge is appointed by the cartel of the parties (Lecture (in German) on theme of the expansion of Islam, Hans Peter Raddatz, Part 5, given May 2010 in Mainz, 0:50 min).

11. “the ‘alternative’ of drying up the AfD after the pattern of the NPD [National Democratic Party] by virtue of terminating the state financing of the party”:

Events putting this plan into motion are recent (2 February 2018). A typical English-language article on this can be found at Deutsche Welle (English language version):

Representatives from all 16 German states — known as the Bundesrat — voted on Friday to ask Germany’s highest court to apply a law that would see the far-right NPD cut off from state funding for six years. (2 February 2018).

The nationalist NPD has been in existence since the 1960s and is consistently labelled “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” by mainstream press. It is generally agreed that the party has a very small amount of public support.

12. (von Arnim) “None of this is speculation, but is common unity-praxis, which until now has taken down every emergent competition which is democratic or in the interests of Germans as a people [Volksfreundlich] (von Arnim)”.

“Von Arnim” is a reference to the constitutional scholar, Hans Herbert von Armin, whom Dr. Raddatz quoted in a lecture he gave to Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa in May of 2010. Pertaining to the “party cartel”, he quotes von Armin as follows:

The constitutional scholar, von Arnim, whom some of you will also know, who has written several courageous books, said words to the effect that the party-cartel in Germany has taken on an independent existence; that one can no longer say anything more, than that it no longer stands on the basis of a free democratic constitutional structure, but that it has taken on mafia-like contours. (Part 5 of video, 1:04 min.)

For previous essays by or about Hans-Peter Raddatz, see the Hans-Peter Raddatz Archives.