READ FROM TOP

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

BY Ricardo Nuno Costa

On 16 July, Jürgen Elsässer (67) woke up startled at 6 a.m., opened the door of his house while still in his dressing gown, and in front of him were dozens of police officers, some with their faces covered, heavily armed, in a surreal image befitting any authoritarian state. However, it was in Brandenburg, on the outskirts of Berlin, in the Germany of the tragicomic Scholz government, aka the ‘Traffic Light’ coalition.

The police were about to raid his house, while more than 200 federal and Brandenburg state agents were deployed to carry out further searches in eight other houses and offices in the region. Other raids were carried out in the states of Saxony, Hesse and Saxony-Anhalt, ordered by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD), who had ordered Compact to be closed by decree as an ‘association’, when it was legally a publishing house. She also banned any activity by the audiovisual company that produced Compact’s content, such as its YouTube, Facebook and Instagram accounts.

The minister later explained that Compact ‘incites hatred against Jews, against people with a history of migration and against our parliamentary democracy in an indescribable way’. According to the Ministry, the legal basis is the Law on Associations, according to which organisations that are directed against the free and democratic basic order can also be banned.

‘The ban shows that we are also taking action against intellectual arsonists who are fuelling a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and who want to bypass our democratic state,’ the minister explained. “Our message is very clear: we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs in Germany and who does not. Our rule of law protects all those who are harassed because of their faith, their origin, the colour of their skin or even their democratic position.

As early as 2022, the German intelligence services (BND) considered that Compact, ‘as a multimedia company, conveys anti-democratic positions in society and against human dignity’, and since then, it has been classified as far-right by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and under suspicion.

Interviewed by journalists during the police search of the house where he lives with his wife and partner in the company, Elsässer said that ‘in 14 years of existence there has not been a single criminal charge against his magazine’, which is why he was surprised by the minister’s announcement. He also said that he was in contact with his lawyer to defend his rights and jokingly imitated Donald Trump with his fist raised saying that he was ‘ready for a fight’.

Mixed reactions in the press

While journalists from the mainstream media are refusing to give this episode its due importance, others have seen the government’s unusual decision as a clear warning sign. Opinions were divided between the established media and the few journalists still struggling to report, and the internet was abuzz with the event. The tag #Compact was the main topic on German Twitter throughout the day, and Germans and foreigners alike made the Scholz government’s persecution of the media viral. Germany is under the scrutiny of international public opinion for the worst reasons.

Elsässer complains that this is ‘the biggest attack on press freedom in Germany since the 1962 Spiegel Magazine scandal’. At that time, it was discovered that the Adenauer government wanted to silence several journalists by illegal means for political reasons. When this was discovered, Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauß and two state secretaries had to resign. However, not even then was a troublesome media outlet banned, as it is now with his case. Elsässer says that only in the GDR and during National Socialism were things like this scene.

The metamorphosis of Elsässer, the current standard-holder of Germany’s ‘new right’

Jürgen Elsässer is a long-time political activist. With a degree in history and a short career as a teacher, he started out in the far-left anti-German movement in the 1970s, wrote books with a strong anti-national slant, worked on the editorial boards of various left-wing publications such as Junge Welt, Neues Deutschland, he collaborated with Der Freitag and the Jüdische Allgemeine and was editor-in-chief of Konkret magazine, until after disagreements with other elements, he founded Compact magazine in 2010, with the idea of bringing together the best of the left and the right in a transversal front (‘Querfront’), based on national sovereignty, the multipolar world and the rejection of the EU and NATO.

In 2017, with the demonstrations against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy, he joined forces with the leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, considered a quasi-neo-Nazi, and Martin Sellner, leader of Austria’s Identity Movement. Since then, the magazine has become a major reference point for the so-called ‘new right’ and Elsässer has become one of the central figures in the German nationalist spectrum.

His political proposal and trajectory are controversial and very heterodox. He clearly calls for the ‘remigration’ of non-European foreigners, makes claims to Polish territories, likes to provoke his opponents, has aligned himself with openly Islamophobic elements such as Michael Stürzenberger or the PEGIDA movement, has played on the edge, but always within the rules of the game. At least until today.

Elsässer is an experienced figure, with a huge culture and a large archive of articles and books written, where he has changed his mind, or at least his appearance. He says that he hasn’t changed at all, that he remains in the same political position as he was 40 years ago.

He worked for the Die Linke parliamentary group as a member of the BND enquiry committee in the Bundestag. He is an insightful expert on geopolitical issues. In 2012, he was received by then president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Tehran, together with a German entourage. About that trip to Iran, he said he enjoyed everything, only missing a good cold beer, like the good German he claims to be. He recently teamed up with Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s European frontrunner, who advocates a Germany that guarantees its status as a pole in the multipolar world that has already been born and is taking its first steps.

A quality magazine

Compact magazine was the centrepiece of the network that included audiovisual channels, the organisation of events, conferences, the publishing and sale of books and Compact TV, with its YouTube channel, which recently reached one million views a day.

Over the years, you could say that the magazine has moved to the right. In 2014, it dedicated a cover to Netanyahu, in which it accused him of perpetrating a ‘Genocide in Gaza’, then shifted its focus to criticising immigration, especially of Islamic origin. Later articles were also read against Hamas. With the pandemic, it took a clear stance against the government, the pharmaceutical industry and the accusation of a biological warfare conspiracy by the great powers of the West.

With Russia’s entry into Ukraine, it advocated dialogue with Moscow and the resumption of Russian energy. It was one of the few media outlets to do an exhaustive report on the Nord Stream attacks, to which it devoted almost an entire issue. In its December 2023 issue, it details how an extremely powerful Zionist sect with global reach, currently in the Israeli government, is planning an eschatological end-of-times war with catastrophic consequences for the whole world.

The absence of the Compact has already been felt since the arrival of the ‘Traffic Light’ government. Heavy pressure on distributors led to the magazine disappearing from petrol stations, supermarkets, newsagents and bookshops. Little by little, it was confined to subscribers. It was one of the few magazines where you could read good geopolitical articles.

The German typhoon

The magazine ban is just one more of the government’s decisions that threaten to divide German society, but it doesn’t seem to bother the establishment, either in the government or in the opposition on the traditional right.

Brandenburg’s Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) welcomed the federal government’s move. Stübgen accused the magazine of spreading ‘Russian war propaganda and conspiracy theories against the democratic order’. He also said that ‘this platform of enemies of democracy has only one goal, which is the destruction of our liberal society’.

In a comment on social media, historian Hermann Ploppa, identified with the left wing and linked to the famous alternative politics portal Apolut, confesses that ‘the Compact is not to my liking. A lot of it is simply disgusting. But there is no violation of the law. It’s also clear that the Compact ban is the opening fanfare to suppress the inconvenient media. That’s why we shouldn’t stand idly by. WE ARE NEXT.”

Across the party spectrum, only the AfD criticised the magazine ban. The party’s leaders, Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, jointly announced on Tuesday that it was a ‘serious blow to press freedom’. ‘The banning of a media organisation means the denial of discourse and diversity of opinion.’ According to the far-right party, the interior minister is abusing her powers to ‘suppress critical information’.

Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW had not commented on the Compact ban at the time of writing. Wagenknecht has been on the cover of the magazine on more than one occasion. In its December 2022 issue, she was described as ‘The best chancellor: A candidate for left and right’. The relationship between Elsässer and Wagenknecht goes back to the 90s. In 1996, a still communist Elsässer interviewed his comrade Wagenknecht, long before he became one of the main ideologues of the new ‘Querfront’ between the ‘left of labour and the right of values’, an enterprise for which he has called on Wagenknecht to participate on several occasions in recent times.

The Zakharova interview

If the move against Compact magazine didn’t come without warning, it did coincide with the interview with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, conducted two days earlier by Compact’s Moscow correspondent Hansjörg Müller and broadcast on the magazine’s website and YouTube channel.

With hundreds of thousands of hits on the first day on the website and more than 250,000 on YouTube, Zakharova ridiculed the “traffic light” government in the one-and-a-half hour interview. She sharply criticised the policies of Scholz, Baerbock and the sanctions, which not only destroy relations between Berlin and Moscow, but also harm Germany’s own interests, all at the behest of “third-party interests”.

The Russian spokeswoman also alluded to the problem of immigration in Germany, which she said had geopolitical origins, with Berlin playing a subservient role to “US and British operations in the Middle East and Southern Africa”, which are causing the migratory chaos that is burdening Europe.

She also spoke about Germany’s obligations under the 1999 2+4 Treaty, the murky role of the German authorities in the case of Navalny’s alleged poisoning in 2020, the pandemic, vaccines and the announced abolition of paper money in Europe, the Federal Reserve, the destruction of Nord Stream, and much more. All in all, a fascinating interview, highly recommended, and very uncomfortable for Western liberal elites, especially Germans.

It’s clear that, once again, the German government is acting in accordance with the Washington Consensus, because the magazine in question was clearly in favour of peace between Germany and Russia, was gaining public influence and threatening several pillars on which Germany’s structure has rested since 1945. The fact that this doesn’t please many people is understandable, but it does make it an illegal outlet. Mrs Faeser’s decision sets a serious precedent, foreshadowing difficult days ahead for free information in Germany and Europe. Having found no illegality, the German government had to use two paragraphs of a law on associations to ban a publishing house because it was inconvenient. It’s all food for thought.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/07/17/scholz-orders-closure-of-one-of-the-oppositions-largest-media-networks-after-interview-with-zakharova/

READ FROM TOP.

Germany lies in the center of Europe in more ways than one. Not only is it the geographical center, but all of European history seems to revolve around it. In German there is the term Mitteleuropa, which aptly conveys Germany’s pivotal role in Europe. To be honest, to some extent France and Italy also need to be considered part of that concept, especially those parts of France and Italy bordering on Germany. European civilization has essentially been shaped by Germany and those two “junior partners.”

From a holistic point of view, Germany’s central position may help to explain why during the past century the Anglo-Saxons (England and the US) have twice tried to destroy Germany, and with considerable success! Obviously, the US is not a European nation, except perhaps indirectly as a result of mass immigration from Europe. Nor is England, which is at best part of Europe’s periphery. Europe’s actual periphery consists of Scandinavia, Russia, the Iberian Peninsula, Southern Italy and the Balkans. England’s insular position physically and mentally sets it apart from Europe. After all it is well known that the inhabitants of any island, no matter how small, tacitly see themselves as the center of the universe. In a fundamental and very tangible sense, England’s geographical position gives it a separate status, rendering it a lot less European than it likes to pretend.

Together with its American ally and relying on the resources and manpower of its vast colonial empire, England has been a moving force behind the first two efforts to destroy Germany during World Wars I and II. The first, especially through the Versailles Diktat, resulted in the destruction of German military power, the second led to the destruction of its political power. On a continent where, since 1918 Fascism and National Socialism had apparently taken root quite firmly, Germany, on account of its economic and demographic weight, was once again the core element.

After Germany’s second defeat by the Red Army, the USSR made sure National Socialism was thoroughly eradicated. In the occupied western portions of Germany the Anglo-Americans set up an entire framework to prevent the Nazi party from resurrecting in any form whatsoever. Denazification of Western Germany was supervised by the US, with its extensive, well-developed propaganda (“PR”) agencies. Since about one in every ten Germans was a member of the Nazi party, the first step in this process was obvious: to declare the Nazi party illegal and to punish those who had been a member. Then to scrutinize those former party members and decide whom to kill (for “Crimes against Humanity”) and see who might be useful for rebuilding Germany according to US specifications. For both the US and the USSR it was crucial to avoid any confusion caused by any overlap and similarities between National Socialism and Fascism on the one hand, and Socialism (Communism) and Capitalism on the other. Thus the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in the west were in a sense showcases for the empires they were part of as vassal states.

After the collapse of “Real Existing Socialism” in between 1989 and 1991, leading to the implosion of the USSR, for some time the US could cherish the idea that it was the sole surviving superpower and that the entire world was at its feet. There were few Americans to realize that their nation was facing a new and unsuspected challenge. What could possibly serve as a frame of reference, as a guide, as signposts for possible new directions to follow? A very tricky question indeed, because the US regards itself as outside history, as a unique civilization not subject to the laws of history.

Realizing that Fascism, especially in its economic aspects (with big corporations enjoying almost unfettered liberty while at the same time exerting undue influence on all policy decisions) was actually quite an attractive model. Some political aspects of Fascism (like centralization of decision making and full media control) were also attractive. When soon after the fall of Socialism, the US empire fully embraced neoliberalism, a number of Fascist policies were also factually embraced in the process.

Just as after 1918 and 1945, it fell upon Germany to pay the price for the collapse of Socialism in 1989-91. Initially, however, it seemed that Germany benefited from that collapse, because after four decades of separate existence, the two German states could fuse into one. But in exchange, the Federal Republic had to sacrifice its powerful national currency, the German Mark, and allow the establishment of a European Central Bank that introduced a new currency: the Euro (2002).

In hindsight, the reunification of Germany could not have been prevented. It was bound to happen as long as each of the two Germanies had a strong, competitive economy and a robust social fabric and as long as they were needed as showcases in superpower rivalries. Therefore, the new attacks on united Germany (with the ultimate goal of reducing it to the status of a third-rate little country with at most a bit of cute folklore to amuse groups of foreign tourists) focused on the economy and society.

The attack on society reached a new level in the summer of 2015. “We can do this,” Chancellor Merkel said as she opened the doors widely for “asylum seekers,” the 21stcentury’s “poor, huddled masses” from Third World nations destroyed by NATO bombs and cheap agricultural imports from the EU. (It is often overlooked that the agricultural economies of many African nations were destroyed by imports of cheap surpluses produced by heavily subsidized EU farmers). Since many of these newcomers were young, single and often muslim males, the effects are devastating, especially for the safety of women. Entire sections of German cities are now muslim ghettos, with Arabic street signs. Many schools have high percentages of non-German kids, born from illiterate parents, while literacy among the younger generations has been declining at alarming rates. In other words, Germany is rapidly being “de-Germanized.”

The US government had long been irritated by Germany’s growing reliance on cheap and plentiful energy from Russia. The completion of Nord Stream 2, a new gas pipeline through the Baltic, in September 2021 opened vast new possibilities for German industry and German-Russian cooperation, that the Biden regime decided to make good on its threat to sabotage the new pipeline: on 26 September 2022 it was blown up. It is part of a three-pronged coordinated attack on the German economy. The first element is to force Germany to abandon Russian energy and to switch to more expensive US imports, the second to destroy the lucrative German-Chinese business relationship, and the third to force Germany to increase its military spending.

But the toughest nut to crack has been German popular culture and the sense of pride that comes with it. Hence the long-lasting American offensive against German popular culture. It has succeeded in forcing most Germans to listen to American-style music with English lyrics on their radios and TVs. The attack on popular culture is essentially a war on the German spirit, since popular culture is only the immediately visible part of the collective spirit.

As a first step in the attack on German popular culture, the Americans began to reeducate them. For instance, propaganda movies (rather “clips”) were made telling the Germans not to march and how to walk briskly without making too martial an impression. Eventually such reeducation efforts managed to convince German men to pee sitting on the toilet. The Americans did not immediately flood Germany with Hollywood movies (as they did in France in an effort to displace French competitors), perhaps also because the UFA studios in Berlin had been producing popular movies according to similar concepts, with movie stars that were far more popular than any from the US. Until the 1970s, German audiences continued to flock to movies made by German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. German TV channels produced many highly popular series such as Derrick, that were even successfully exported to distant places like China.

Immediately after the war, the Germans were too busy clearing up the rubble of their bombed cities and getting their lives back in order to develop any interest in American music and English lyrics. Instead they had dreams. About faraway places where life was easy and where the sun was shining, such as Tampico in Mexico, as in the 1946 Schlager (“loads of liquor everyday, every man has three women and can afford to build a house.”). For a long time, Germans dreamed of such places and until the 1960s, tried to find these especially in Italy, like around Lake Garda, during their summer vacations. American music did not become the norm in Germany until the early 1990s. Sometimes it was even the other way around, as when American Gus Backus in 1962 became a German Schlager star, singing German lyrics, of course. This in itself was a powerful signal of how attractive the German language and culture were. Along with Backus, there were Italian, Israeli, Greek, Croat, Dutch, French, Belgian and Czech singers all singing Schlager in German, and welcomed by an appreciative public. This is no longer the case now that musical and popular culture have become almost fully Anglicized.

Apart from music, for a long time German sports enjoyed broad popularity, and international successes by West-German, East-German and all-German sportsmen, sportswomen and sports teams would electrify the republic and the nation and strengthen a certain sense of Germanness. In 1954 the German national football (soccer) won the World Cup defeating the famed Hungarian team. I have always suspected that somewhere up in the hierarchy the decision had been made to let Germany win. No better way, short of a victory in war (that had twice escaped Germany), to restore national self-esteem, or at least soften the pain. In 1974 the West-German national team again won the World Cup when the tournament was organized in Germany. In the 1960 Olympics at Rome, the united German team (both FRG and GDR) ended in fourth position, with a record of 12 gold medals. In the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the FRG and GDR teams put together ended in first place with 50 gold medals and a total of 129 medals. Since then, Germany has dropped in the overall medal ranking, taking only 9th place in the 2020 (2021) Olympics. In soccer, the (West)-German national team only won the UEFA (European) championship a mere three times in so far eighteen tournaments. The current German national team, once in its moments of greatest glory exclusively composed of real Germans, has a Turkish captain and half a dozen “black” Germans. For many native Germans it is rather difficult to identify with such a national team. However it is a faithful reflection of a population of which 30% has a “migration background.”

The destructive attack on Germany would not have yielded any tangible results if the Anglo-Americans had not succeeded in subverting German collective consciousness, or the German mind, if you will. By constantly hammering on the German guilt for World War I, World War II and for every real or imagined misdeed to any group of people, the Germans were talked into having a true guilt complex. This is especially noticeable among German millennials and the German Generation Z. Unlike their counterparts from elsewhere in Europe, these young Germans almost break under the weight of their guilt feelings. They are so guilt-ridden as to be even unable to support any jokes on these issues, no matter how innocent. Not one of them can grasp the notion that they are absolutely not accountable for the real or imagined deeds of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Add to that the fact among those younger German generations wokeness, climate and gender lunacy have taken root more firmly than anywhere else in Europe, and it is obvious Germany is heading for the exit.

In addition, with a government composed of incompetents, imbeciles and traitors faithfully carrying out orders from Washington DC, it is obvious that Germany is fast becoming the very antithesis of the country it once was. Even the trains no longer run on time!

After two wars and about a century of sabotage, the Anglo-Saxons have finally been able to get the better of Germany. Theodore W. Kaufman’s 1941 exhortation has almost been executed: Germany Must Perish!

https://www.unz.com/article/germany-destroyed/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.