>Yes, that is a perfect example of how right-wing populism works, thank you for the demonstration: I say "right-wing populism went into overdrive and this hurt the election results of these parties" and you respond by saying I want to censor people with right-wing views and "silence" them.
Yes, this is a perfect example how political silencing works: I say everyone should get an equal voice, and you twist my words, and say I'm supporting right-wing populism.
Bro, I never said YOU are trying to censor people, I'm saying the political situation in Germany is always trying to censor everything even remotely right leaning as if they're all Nazis. There's right wing, then there's the far right which are Nazis. Big difference, but in Germany you're not allowed any kind of right leaning opinions, and must be censored.
Censoring one group by default is basically the definition of a dictatorship.
> Big difference, but in Germany you're not allowed any kind of right leaning opinion
The fact that the centre-right economically and to a large extent socially, Angela Merkel, was chancellor for 16 years, and that the neo-nazi adjacent AfD exist proves you wrong.
There's right, and there' s "let's deport everyone of immigrant descent" far-right (using an example from the French far right because it's a fun one I recall, no idea if the AfD also campaign for this). Surely you can see how they're different and why one is actually actively dangerous, especially in a country that knows all too well when you let far rightists get away with it.
> Yes, this is a perfect example how political silencing works: I say everyone should get an equal voice, and you twist my words, and say I'm supporting right-wing populism.
You are the one twisting words here. Just like you twisted GP words in your previous post. GP did not say that you support right-wing populism but that your post was a perfect demonstration of it. This post of yours is also a demonstration of what GP was talking about.
> GP did not say that you support right-wing populism but that your post was a perfect demonstration of it.
Sorry, but what's the difference? That's being needlessly pedantic on a technicality.
> Just like you twisted GP words in your previous post.
I didn't twist his words because I was contradicting the political situation in Germany, not his opinion. And then he called my take as being "a perfect demonstration of right wing populism" which reinforces my point that you can't contradict the status quo in Germany and have a contrarian voice, without being called a right wing populist and people immediately bringing up the AFD even though you never did and don't even remotely support them.
But since you all brought it up, the Afd situation in Germany is something that's real that should be resolved through education and public conversations and debates, not silenced and swept under the rug pretending it doesn't exist as that just makes the problem worse.
I don't think you have a good understanding of what is going on in Germany. 20% of the German population currently want to vote for a fascist who likes to cite right wing terrorists, thinks Hitler wasn't all bad and wants to deport everyone whose grandparents aren't German, so how can you say "Right wing people are being censored"? This guy is on state television all the time.
I wasn't talking about right wing nutjobs getting screen time, I was talking about having sane right leaning discussion with people, which you can't because you're automatically pointed to the Afd nutjobs on TV as being representative for what you're trying to say, even though you have no connection to those people.
> I wasn't talking about right wing nutjobs getting screen time
You mean like Friedrich Merz, who coined the term "Sozialtourismus" ("social (welfare) tourism")? Horst Seehofer, the previous minister of the interior, who called migration the "mother of all problems in this country"? Last time I checked even the left treated them as "serious politicians" regardless of ther character.
The question really is what is it that you think you can't have a "sane right leaning discussion" about anymore? Usually when I hear people say that, it's about topics like race and IQ (and why we should treat people of different races differently because of that), sex differences (and why we should treat people of different sexes differently because of that), hetero- vs homosexuality (and why we should treat people with different sexual orientations differently because of that), poor people underachieving (and why we should treat them worse because of that) or trans people (and why we should treat them as sexual perverts).
If it's any comfort to you: I live in the North-West of Germany and most people I know think there's some meaningful difference between races (but we shouldn't treat people of other races worse for it), some meaningful difference between sexes (but we shouldn't treat people of other sexes worse for it), homosexuality is kinda icky and abnormal (but we shouldn't treat them worse for it), poor people are mostly at fault for where they are in life (but we should still generally support them) and trans people are weird freaks (but we should still treat them somewhat respectfully). I'm decidedly to the left of all of these stances and you can find plenty of people to have a "right leaning discussion" about these issues with, though I can't vouch for the sanity of it or how far right it will lean. I suspect the same is true in the South and especially the East of Germany, and even city centers like Berlin or Hamburg.
What I find the most absurd is how people belonging to a discriminated group actively participate in the discrimination sometimes. This is especially true for poor people. Just try to convince poor people that a tax on inheritance above X million euros would be fair, most of them have fought me hard. Everyone believes in the lie of permeable social levels, e.g. from dishwasher to millionaire.
> not silenced and swept under the rug pretending it doesn't exist as that just makes the problem worse.
Ironically there's a common misconception that Germany overcame its Nazi past through a process of "Denazification". Instead what happened was that while there were plenty of trials of former NSDAP members they usually resulted in hardly any consequences and frequently people were even able to go back into public offices because a lot of the evidence was deliberately swept under the rug. The biggest outcome instead was that "right-wing" became a dirty word by becoming synonymous with "nazi", so conservatives would go on referring to themselves as the "political center" while completely ignoring the role the Christliche Mitte (a Christian conservative party that strongly resembled the modern Union) played in Hitler's rise to power and the passing of the Enablement Act to reign in the lefties. Oh and of course for good measure we banned nazi symbols and slogans, which has led to "conservative" activists flying the flag of the German Empire (which shares the same colors and also pre-dates the Weimar Republic, which conservatives at the time saw as a leftist perversion).
And because most people on the far right are smart enough not to show up bald-headed in jack boots, camo jackets and flying the flag of the German Empire anymore, we're now at the point where the same people applauding for suggestions that immigrants should be shot at the border instead fly the German flag and talk about "protecting families" and "protecting our values". Basically our far right has arrived at the same point as the American far right (as laid out in the infamous leaked audio of a politician saying that you can't openly talk about Black people anymore so you instead have to talk about more abstract things like "urban crime" to still talk about Black people). And worryingly the "centrist" conservatives have over the past eight years or so adopted some of the same talking points and one of the conservative Union front-runners jokingly described his party as "an alternative for Germany" (AfD means "Alternative for Germany").
So yes, outright censorship doesn't work. The problem isn't the symbolism, the problem is the ideology. They will just move on to new symbols and new talking points if you don't stomp out the ideology. But don't worry: Germany will never stomp out the ideology of the far right. If we couldn't do it after the Holocaust, I don't think it will ever happen.
And while we're on a detour (because there obviously is no point in addressing anything you say given that you've now twice reframed what I said to presumably argue against someone not present in this conversation): the other day I was near the train station and passed a homeless person when something caught my eye: in the middle of the plaza was a large art installation celebrating tolerance and inclusion. It was covered by a lot of verbiage meant to spark conversation among passers-by and "enable dialogues" or whatever the cool kids do with political art these days. The entire thing was sponsored by a federal ministry and some German NGOs, for some reason there were also some leaflets about seasonal food although I'm not sure how that fits into the overall messaging about queer identities and immigrants. But I digress. After inspecting the art piece for a bit, I came across one headline on a poster board containing some wisdom about loving your neighbor: "Where does the idea that some people deserve more than others come from?"
Actually, let's digress even further since we're already just typing arbitrary words in a text box instead of having a meaningful conversation. A lot of people use the words "left" and "right" in politics without having a clear idea what they mean. Going back to early modern France isn't particularly helpful in the absence of a monarchy either, so I can understand a lot of the frustration behind this. Personally, I go by the definition that "right" means "more hierarchies" or "more static hierarchies" and "left" means "fewer hierarchies" or "more flexible hiearchies". These definitions are rightfully relative because there clearly isn't a meaningful "middle ground" between directly opposed political movements (after all, who would have agreed to let the Nazis have "only some genocide" if the question was Holocaust or no Holocaust?) but they fit neatly across the various layers politics are usually applied to: are straight people better (more morally correct?) than queer people? are people born here more deserving than people who only moved here? are children of wealthy people jusftifiably better off than children of poor people? do you lose if you snooze? do some deserve more than others?
Politics don't exist in a vacuum. Politics go right to the core of how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Elections in a representative democracy aren't a sport no matter how much the political system alienates us from itself through the centralization of power. Politics are informed by our ethical principles and electoral politics is how we do violence to support those principles, ideally without actually using direct violence against each other.
If you feel that everyone has a right to be heard, that is fine, and if that is integral to your ethical system, it is entirely acceptable to say that anyone opposing this principle is your enemy. But most people who say they value free speech to the extreme don't actually have that as the central basis of their ethical system. They usually just want to be able to say and hear certain opinions they agree with and that they think are unpopular. But the ability to say and hear unpopular opinions is merely a means to an end: once their social order is etablished, they want it to persist (because of course they would, otherwise what is even the point of establishing it) and at that point they would no longer want the opposition to speak freely. Libertarians may in some cases genuinely hold the absolute freedom of speech as a core value, but this does not mean they don't believe in hierarchies: favoring free trade for example means the ability to take advantage of the needs of others at their expense and to your benefit. Absolute freedom must always also include the ability to limit the freedoms of others because otherwise it can not be absolute. This leads to hierarchies, whether implicitly or explicitly. Thus the leftist anarchist who believes in the complete abolition of hierarchies must be at odds not just with the authoritarian who wants a predetermined rigid hierarchy but also the libertarian who wants an arbitrary dynamic hierarchy ruled by the market and the ability of its participants to take advantage of each other.
I don't think states are the answer to eliminating hierarchies because they are hierarchical by nature. It's like expecting corporations to help abolish capitalism: the incentives are completely misaligned. Where do people get the ideas that some people are worth more or more deserving than others? It's baked into the system. You can't debate the idea away within the system as doing so would challenge the system itself and the system is set up to reinforce itself. Any party openly running on a ticket of dissolving the state would be banned for being anti-constitutional the same way any part openly calling for another Holocaust would be. From a true libertarian standpoint (or the standpoint claimed by someone on the opposing end of the political spectrum trying to hide their true intentions) you can argue that all forms of censorship is wrong and all political options should be on the table and that the public opinion should decide. But through the mere circumstance of the debate happening in a system in which a state exists, the options on the table are already filtered by what the system can represent and the public opinion is already shaped by the system into which the members of the public were raised and exist in (as the saying goes: a fish has no concept of water). As someone more willing to side with the left anarchist side of this three-way split, I understand why my ideology is incompatible with the state and why the state can't allow it to blossom within itself, which is why I don't feign surprise when anarchist groups are attacked by it even when they have no interest in using physical violence. A person on the authoritarian end of the spectrum on the other hand is much more likely to be overlooked if they don't openly state their end goals and the precise nature of the hierarchies they want to use the state to manifest and enforce. A person on the libertarian end in contrast will only meet resistance when openly acting against the state itself (like the Unabomber did) but not when trying to erode its protective mechanisms under the banner of "opening it to the market". But that is largely due to the state existing in the overlap of its own structural system of hierarchy and other systems of hierarchy like capitalism.
Now with all that said, the Green party very much is not anarchist and while it's hardly as authoritarian as the right likes to claim, it is also certainly not libertarian. In the real world most people don't have coherent ideologies because they have more immediately important things in life than sussing out the logical contradictions of what they think is important or good. Political groups are made of people and then things get even more muddled.
However just like right authoritarians like to hide behind libertarian talking points to advance their goals so do some libertarians capture right authoritarian movements to advance theirs by undoing the structural changes that further the goals of those on the left (e.g. codifying gender equality in law, thus attempting to use the hiearchical state to attack the gender hierarchy). And to make things worse, the right will often also adopt left talking points (e.g. talking negatively about "the elites" but referring to a specific demographic group rather than the existence of an elite in general). This is right-wing populism: using a talking point that has a good chance of wide popular support ("protect the children", "save our jobs") to further a tangentially related goal (ban transgender identities, restrict immigration) or create popular support by presenting a largely fictional threat or heavily misrepresenting reality (e.g. examples of "looting" after Hurricane Katrina that turned out to be survivors helping each other or "looting" their own homes, "rapists and gang members flooding the border", BLM protestors "burning down cities"). More often than not, this is also used to hijack left-wing talking points that happen to fit the current zeitgeist (e.g. infamously the NSDAP referred to Jews as "international bankers" at various points to hijack the success of socialist movements at the time). Contrast this with "left-wing populism" which is usually applied as a label to anyone promoting ideas like "raising taxes on the rich", "increasing minimum wage", "providing free health care for all", "providing free education for all", etc implying there is something more sinister they're not saying openly (which, based on reports from FBI investigations into leftist groups, is generally not the case: leftist groups are fairly straightforward about what they want).
Apologies if you've read through all this. Or not. Maybe it taught someone something. It was certainly more educational than whatever the point of crying censorship over the mention of the existence of right wing populism was.
> Personally, I go by the definition that "right" means "more hierarchies" or "more static hierarchies" and "left" means "fewer hierarchies" or "more flexible hiearchies"
Interesting take. Not sure I agree with it, but interesting.
Personally I'm a fan of pizza/radar charts for politics, because things are so much more nuanced than a left/right sliding scale could tell. Ecology, foreign, internal, economic, social policy, etc.
Yes, this is a perfect example how political silencing works: I say everyone should get an equal voice, and you twist my words, and say I'm supporting right-wing populism.
Bro, I never said YOU are trying to censor people, I'm saying the political situation in Germany is always trying to censor everything even remotely right leaning as if they're all Nazis. There's right wing, then there's the far right which are Nazis. Big difference, but in Germany you're not allowed any kind of right leaning opinions, and must be censored.
Censoring one group by default is basically the definition of a dictatorship.