For the last couple of months the German Counterjihad has been staging the largest and most effective public demonstrations in Europe. The heart of the resistance is in what used to be East Germany, where people can still remember what it is like to live under a mendacious totalitarian regime, and are not at all willing to suffer a new one without protest. Last night’s march by PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) in Dresden drew a reported 15,000 participants.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has obviously been unnerved by these impertinent upstarts who refuse to accept her official Politically Correct Multicultural narrative. The situation has become so alarming that, before last night’s PEGIDA march took place, a sitting chancellor of the German Federal Republic took the unprecedented step of saying the following things about peaceful protesters who rallied in an orderly fashion to object to her government’s policies:
Chancellor Angela Merkel warned people against playing into the hands of xenophobes hours before an ‘anti-Islamization’ march in Dresden on Monday evening.
[…]
“Of course there’s freedom to demonstrate in Germany,” Merkel said in Berlin on Monday. “But it’s no place for agitation and mud-slinging against people who come to us from other countries.
“That’s why everyone should watch out that they aren’t being instrumentalized by the initiators of an event like this.”
The PEGIDA demonstrators have been dubbed “Nazis in pinstripes” by mainstream politicians and the press. It’s an egregious and false canard directed at ordinary people who have simply decided that they’ve had enough, and they aren’t going to take any more.
JLH has translated four articles from various German-language sources about PEGIDA and related “uprisings”. He includes this introduction:
Clipping the Flying Horse’s Wings
Already, during the early days of PEGIDA, some atavistic linguistic quirk made me equate the acronym with Pegasus, the fabulous, flying horse. The name took on a truly magical quality for me when I was reminded that this is twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was impelled in no small measure by regular demonstrations in the “heart of darkness” — East Germany. Demonstrations that were slandered and mocked by the authorities, who had once bloodily suppressed the “workers’ revolt” but had by this time grown lazy and fearful, and could not stem the popular tide led by those who would no longer be denied.
And, as Michael Mannheimer reminded us, here they are again. The outraged citizens in the street. The arrogant, disapproving authorities. The visceral opponents invested in the status quo and protecting their own stake in a future totalitarianism. Who is going to blink?
One problem is that the old GDR had the disapproval of the world to consider, but the new Keepers of the West have only their approving peers, including our own government. Let us hope that the complex of uprisings Sarrazin mentions are strong enough.
So this is a rainbow of reactions to PEGIDA, beginning with the PI enthusiasm laced with anti-regime snarkiness, moving to the head of the AfD party’s approval as contrasted with the disapproval of “officials,” then the measured but deadly response of Thilo Sarrazin, and finally an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sample of how the establishmentarian press and some government circles reply to such impertinence.
The first translation is from Politically Incorrect:
The Establishment Panics — The Masses in Dresden Are Changing Germany
by Wolfgang Hübner, Frankfurt a/M
The Green-Left-Liberal zeitgeist of the “antifa-republic” is reacting with insults, adjurations and threats to the broad, gradually accelerating popular insurgency against Islamization, uncontrolled immigration, abuse of asylum, social deterioration and gender insanity. The aggressive but fruitless attempt to isolate and smother the protest in Dresden — as well as an increasing number of other German cities and regions — by means of the tried and true methods of marginalization and the “Nazi-club” is doomed to failure. The sober reality is the powerful alliance of all those who are now freeing themselves of their passivity and are no longer allowing themselves to be tutored by politicians, media, princes of the Church and the gigantic social industry. Everything is as it should be and all that is needed is a selfless, humble welcoming culture between Flensburg and Konstanz.
What initially became evident with the founding and first election successes of AfD (Alternative for Germany) is taking on the characteristics of a mass movement against the visible, tangible and calculable aberrations in Germany which are evident to every contemporary who is paying attention. In fact, it took a long time before the grumbling at the much maligned Stammtische [regular, informal meetings at the same pub] and in countless internet forums became an active protest in the streets and squares. It is no surprise that this protest had its first mass effect in a metropolis in the East, namely Dresden. In the former GDR, there still linger the memory and the consciousness of the power of the people to budge even totally ossified circumstances.
Angela Merkel’s “no-alternative” bourgeois era of politics is still not over, but it is no longer accepted without question. To be sure, the human face of these paralyzing epochs in German history can one more time ensure with actual socialist majorities the blessing of her party — now emptied of both intellect and personnel. But the Chancellor would be just as bereft of power or argument in the face of a genuine popular movement as are members of her cabinet and all the political and media establishment, who have been emitting commentaries on the events in Dresden which are as ignorant as they are dense. This proves only one thing: The power elite are prepared for almost anything — except the unexpected uprising of the sovereign folk. Seldom until now has it become so obvious that an aloof nomenklatura can form, one that will not accept itself and its conception of social order being questioned in a completely democratic fashion.
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The threat by hactivists to commit acts of terror at movie theaters has caused Sony to cancel the upcoming release of its comedy The Interview, which mocks North Korea. The U.S. government has determined that North Korea was behind the hack attack that has disabled the entertainment giant.
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