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Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sat 7 Dec, 2024 01:22 am
Far-right activists from Germany spent US election day at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
Quote:
As Donald Trump gathered his supporters, family and friends at Mar-a-Lago on US election day last month to wait for the results to trickle in, a small group of far-right Germans went largely unnoticed.

Among them was the purported semi-professional, one-time porn actor, self-confessed former cocaine user, convicted thief and hard-right candidate for the German parliament Phillipp-Anders Rau. Together with a compact delegation of young political activists and influencers, Rau posed for the cameras with the American president-elect at his invitation, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in English and German.

Members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party had already been making inroads with the Trump camp for several months before the US vote, as Europe’s populist anti-migration forces attempt to harness Maga’s momentum before Germany’s general election in February.

Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, became one of the first politicians abroad to welcome Trump’s victory, and party members say they are cultivating proximity to the incoming administration, with a few planning to attend next month’s inauguration in Washington.

Rau, an AfD candidate for the Bundestag from Saxony-Anhalt state, posted snapshots on Instagram of his brief encounter with Trump in Florida on 5 November, with voting still under way.

“It will remain an everlasting memory, being allowed as the first and until now only member of the AfD to shake the hand of @realdonaldtrump on the day of his victory,” he wrote. “We hope that Donald Trump will create the renewal for his country that we as the AfD plan for our country.”
hightor
 
  4  
Reply Sat 7 Dec, 2024 05:55 am
Quote:
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

Donald Trump and his cronies have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

hcr
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sat 7 Dec, 2024 07:15 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Incidentally, the far-right AfD has chosen its leader Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor.
The party has no chance of participating in government. Nevertheless, the label is intended to underpin the extreme right-wing party's claim to power.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 06:25 am
Quote:
On Thursday, December 5, in Chicago, Illinois, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action.

Taken together, these lectures are a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense. In 2022, Obama explored ways to counteract the flood of disinformation swamping a shared reality for decision making; in 2023 he discussed ways to address the extraordinary concentration of wealth that has undermined support for democracy globally.

On Thursday, Obama explored the concept of “pluralism,” a word he defined as meaning simply that “in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”

But rather than advocating what he called “holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’” as we all tolerate each other, Obama described modern pluralism as active work to form coalitions over shared issues. His argument echoed the concepts James Madison, a key framer of the Constitution, explained in Federalist #10 when he was trying to convince inhabitants of a big, diverse country that they should endorse the newly written document.

In 1787, many inhabitants of the fledgling nation objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution. They worried that such a government could fall under the control of a majority that would exercise its power to crush the rights of the minority. Madison agreed that such a calamity was likely in a small country, but argued that the very size and diversity of the people in the proposed United States would guard against such tyranny as people formed coalitions over one issue or another, then dissolved them and formed others. Such constantly shifting coalitions would serve the good of all Americans without forging a permanent powerful majority.

Obama called the Constitution “a rulebook for practicing pluralism.” The Bill of Rights gives us a series of rights that allow us to try to convince others to form coalitions to elect representatives who will “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”

Majority rule determines who wins, but the separation of powers and an independent judiciary are supposed to guarantee that the winners “don’t overreach to try to permanently entrench themselves or violate minority rights,” he said. The losers accept the outcome so long as they know they’ll have a chance to win the next time.

Obama noted that this system worked smoothly after World War II, largely because a booming economy meant rising standards of living that eased friction between different groups: management and labor, industry and agriculture. At the same time, the Cold War helped Americans come together against an external threat, and a limited range of popular culture reinforced a shared perspective on the world—everyone watched the sitcom Gilligan’s Island.

Most of all, though, Obama noted, American pluralism worked well because it largely excluded women and racial, gender, and religious minorities. He pointed out that as late as 2005, when he went to the Senate, he was the only African American there and only the third since Reconstruction. There were two Latinos and fourteen women.

In the 1960s, he noted drily, “things got more complicated.” “[H]istorically marginalized groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans; women and gays and lesbians; and disabled Americans—demanded a seat at the table. Not only did they insist on a fair share of government-directed resources, but they brought with them new issues, born of their unique experiences that could not just be resolved by just giving them a bigger slice of the pie. So racial minorities insisted that the government intervene more deeply in the private sector and civil society to root out long-standing, systemic discrimination.”

Women wanted control over their own bodies, and gays and lesbians demanded equality before the law, challenging religious and social norms. “[P]olitics,” Obama said, “wasn’t just a fight about tax rates or roads anymore. It was about more fundamental issues that went to the core of our being and how we expected society to structure itself. Issues of identity and status and gender. Issues of family, values, and faith…. [A] lot of people…began to feel that their way of life, the American way of life, was under attack” just as increasing economic inequality made them think that other people were benefiting at their expense.

Increasingly, that economic inequality cloistered people in their own bubbles as unions, churches, and civic institutions decayed. “[W]ith the Cold War over, with generations scarred by Vietnam and Iraq and a media landscape that would shatter into a million disparate voices,” he said, Americans lost the sense of “a common national story or a common national purpose.” Media companies have played to extremes, and “[e]very election becomes an act of mortal combat.”

With that sense, there is “an increasing willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way, to use the power of the state to target critics and journalists and political rivals, and to even resort to violence in order to gain and hold on to power.”

For all that he was speaking in 2024, Obama could have been describing the realization of the fears of those opposed to the Constitution in 1787.

But he did not agree that those anti-Federalists had won the debate. Instead, he adapted Madison’s theory of pluralism to the modern era. Obama stood firm on the idea that the way to reclaim democracy is to build coalitions around taking action on issues that matter to the American people without regard to personal identities or political affiliations. Pluralism, Obama said, “is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”

And that, in many ways, identified the elephant—or rather the donkey—in the room. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party under Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz very deliberately moved away from so-called identity politics: the idea that a person builds their political orientation around their pre-existing social identity. During the campaign, Harris rarely referred to the fact that if elected, she would be the first woman, as well as the first woman of color, to hold the presidency: when attendees at the Democratic National Convention wore white in honor of the suffragists, Harris wore black.

Instead, Harris and Walz embraced investing in the middle class and supporting small businesses. But that shift to the center did not translate into a presidential victory in 2024, and those on the political left, as well as progressive Democrats, are not convinced it was a good move.

Since the rise of Donald Trump, the MAGA party has been the one championing identity politics, rejecting American pluralism in favor of centering whiteness, a certain kind of individualist masculinity, Christianity, and misogyny. Making common cause with Republicans, even non-MAGA Republicans, in the face of such politics seems to the left and progressive Democrats self-defeating.

Obama disagrees. “It’s understandable that people who have been oppressed or marginalized want to tell their stories and give voice fully to their experiences—to not have to hold back and censor themselves, especially because so many of them have been silenced in the past,” he said, “But too often, focusing on our differences leads to this notion of fixed victims and fixed villains.”

He stood firm against compromising core principles but said: “In order to build lasting majorities that support justice—not just for feeling good, not just for getting along, to deliver the goods—we have to be open to framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in in terms of ‘we’ and not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

And he emphasized that such cooperation works best when it’s about action, rather than just words, because action requires that people invest themselves in a common project. “It won't eradicate people's prejudices, but it will remind people that they don't have to agree on everything to at least agree on some things. And that there are some things we cannot do alone.” “It’s about agency and relationships.”

Then Obama addressed the political crisis of this moment, the one the anti-Federalists feared: “What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules?” When that happens, he said, “pluralism does not call for us” to accept it. “[W]e have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.” Even then, though, “it’s important to look for allies in unlikely places,” he said, noting that “people on the other side…may share our beliefs in sticking to the rules, observing norms,” and that supporting them might help them “to exert influence on people they’ve got relationships with within the other party.”

The power of pluralism, he said, is that it can make people recognize their common experiences and common values. That, he said, is how we break the cycle of cynicism in our politics.

Obama’s argument has already drawn criticism. At MSNBC, Ben Burgis condemned Obama’s “centrist liberalism” as inadequate to address the real problems of inequality and warned that his political approach is outdated.

But it is striking how much Obama’s embrace of pluralism echoes that of James Madison, who had in his lifetime witnessed a group of wildly diverse colonists talk, write letters, argue, and organize to forge themselves into a movement that could throw off the age-old system of monarchy in favor of creating something altogether new.

hcr
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -3  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 07:46 am
@Walter Hinteler,
I notice you attach ‘extreme right’ and ‘far right’ to the AfD almost every time you refer to that group. It seems like training from Western propagandist media.

Would you articulate why you consider them extreme right and far right?
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 08:29 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
It seems like training from Western propagandist
I was "trained" in history at two German and one English university, some decades ago (and at school before, of course).
Walter Hinteler
 
  5  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 08:36 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Would you articulate why you consider them extreme right and far right?
The AfD attacks the fundamental values of the constitution and represents extreme right-wing positions: the party is nationalist and racist, uses conspiracy myths to underpin its propaganda and utilises anti-Semitic and misanthropic ideologemes.

The AfD is no longer just any right-wing populist party, but has clearly distanced itself from the basic democratic consensus: from the principle of human dignity and the freedom and civil rights of this country. This is underpinned by announcements that borrow from right-wing terrorist rhetoric and leave no doubt about the AfD's stance on violence: Nazi slogans are spread completely uninhibited.
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 09:38 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Walter Hinteler wrote:

Lash wrote:
Would you articulate why you consider them extreme right and far right?


The AfD attacks the fundamental values of the constitution

Quote:
The Democrats do this in the US. They have been caught manipulating social media to suppress their crimes in order to subvert an election, they attacked a sitting president by weaponizing departments of government to create false documents attacking the duly-elected president--I can't enumerate all the Constitutional and other laws broken by that party. Are they right wing?


and represents extreme right-wing positions: the party is nationalist and racist, uses conspiracy myths to underpin its propaganda and utilises anti-Semitic and misanthropic ideologemes.
Quote:
These strike me as propagandist smears that really say--this party disagrees with our overriding political goals. Nationalist. They thought the EU was a bad idea. This is a valid opinion, not a crime. They want fewer people coming into the country. This is a valid opinion, not a crime. What is a racist? The US was built on racism: the genocide of one brown-skinned race and the enslavement of another. Is the US far-right? Has your media convinced you that anyone who wants to slow immigration = a racist? I hope you'll think about this.

One of the so called antisemitic statements I saw reported by the BBC years ago was an AdF leader saying that the Holocaust didn't define Germany, but some act as though it does, and further that Germans have things in their past to be proud of. That's not antisemitic and it's ridiculous that anyone considers it to be. The outrageous iron curtain of speech control and cultural control dropped over Germany is a ghastly injustice--no one should have the power to do so.

Populist isn't a bad word--it's a majority of the people trying to live in this world. They're not always right, but they ARE always feared by the minority in control--and infiltrated, demonized, and attacked by the powerful with the goal of neutralization.

The people don't have many options for a semblance of representation. Sometimes they look like Nazis (or are made to), sometimes they have a bad spray tan and orange cotton candy on their heads.


The AfD is no longer just any right-wing populist party, but has clearly distanced itself from the basic democratic consensus: from the principle of human dignity and the freedom and civil rights of this country. This is underpinned by announcements that borrow from right-wing terrorist rhetoric and leave no doubt about the AfD's stance on violence: Nazi slogans are spread completely uninhibited.
Quote:
Alas! The big question here is--who decides what is the 'basic democratic consensus'??? Would it not be the majority of the voters?? Idea Who is skulking around in the shadows, moneychanging, and getting to decide? (this space is room for thought)
But most of your complaints read like a narrative with the jargon of propagandists, and I'm not blaming you, but pointing it out. A writing teacher would ask you to 'show, don't tell.' I can only say again that that great beacon of democracy where I've lived my entire life has departed from democracy in myriad horrifying ways--by gouging citizens--even the poorest--for taxes which do not provide safety and health for them, but is washed through wars all over the world while Americans freeze in tents because FEMA says they don't have money for them. Our 'lawmakers' are millionaires, guilty of insider trading, above the law, fighting the Constitution our nation was founded on.

'Right wing terrorist rhetoric'? That seems tame in the face of using law enforcement to beat citizens down in the street because they want to express disagreement with their government's actions.



I know political groups in the US (the Greens for one, Bernie's murdered campaign for another just off the top of my head) are routinely infiltrated to seem nefarious, aligned with Russia, sexist, racist, etc etc. It is very likely the same is done to the AfD.

We should at least admit to ourselves that this is so.
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 09:40 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Apologies. I should have said 'conditioning.'
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 09:49 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Walter wrote:
...the principle of human dignity and the freedom and civil rights of this country...


This is what they are fighting for.
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 09:53 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Alas! The big question here is--who decides what is the 'basic democratic consensus'??? Would it not be the majority of the voters?? Idea Who is skulking around in the shadows, moneychanging, and getting to decide? (this space is room for thought)o.
We have a constitution (Grundgesetz, "Basic Law") and a Bundesverfassungsgericht ("Federal Constitutional Court").

Well, "the majority of the voters" could decide to vote for parties who want to abolish our constitution.
But: A bill to amend the Basic Law, which must set out and justify the proposal, requires the approval of at least two-thirds of the respective members in the Bundestag and Bundesrat (‘1st and 2nd chambers’).
And then we have the "eternity clause", which establishes that fundamental principles of Germany's democracy can never be removed, even by parliament.
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 10:00 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Walter wrote:
...the principle of human dignity and the freedom and civil rights of this country...


This is what they are fighting for.
Oh. You must have got different knowledge than officially published by the AfD.
According to that, courts here said that they (at least parts of them) represent anti-constitutional positions.

Interesting.
Where did you get your knowledge of German constitutional law from if I may ask?
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 10:02 am
@Walter Hinteler,
'The majority of voters' cannot if nations continue to demonize certain political parties and weaponize the 'justice' system to imprison their leaders. Allow them to vote unmolested--or stop the pretense of using the term democratic.
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 10:14 am
@Lash,
Where did you get your knowledge of German constitutional law I've asked already before.
I like to add: get informed about our electoral system.

Otherwise: are you suggesting that we should get a new constitution in accordance with Article 146 of the Basic Law?
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 10:21 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Can you articulate the AfD's anti-Constitutional positions?
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 10:23 am
@Lash,
I did.
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 11:27 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Besides that I want to return your advice to me
You wrote:
I don’t want to make you lazy. Do a little research.🧐 Mr. Green
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 11:47 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Heh.

No matter. They haven’t done anything but talk. As I proved, plenty of lauded political parties have done much worse, including multiple genocides.
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 12:00 pm
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
They haven’t done anything but talk.
The AfD is a German party, and we have the Basic Law here.
Grundgesetz wrote:
This Basic Law thus applies to the entire German people.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Sun 8 Dec, 2024 12:04 pm
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
As I proved, plenty of lauded political parties have done much worse, including multiple genocides.
Are you referring here to the NSDAP? Following the military defeat of Germany in World War II, the party was declared illegal.
 

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