For The Hot Screen, there is no news in the last week more unsettling and requiring the spotlight of international condemnation and outrage than the neo-Nazi-led protests and assaults of immigrants in the German city of Chemnitz. Purportedly meant to protest the alleged killing of a German man by a Muslim and a Syrian refugee, these activities are clearly intended to demonize and physically intimidate Germany’s immigrant population in order to increase the power of extremist political parties, at the cost of human rights and the rule of law.
Whatever legitimate cultural and economic concerns may exist in the wake of Angela Merkel’s decision to let in a million refugees from parts of the world ravaged by civil strife have been overshadowed by a disproportionate and vicious response that hearkens back to German behavior in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Once again, scapegoating of minority populations is the order of the day. And so a small but growing group of citizens in the country that started both world wars, implemented the Holocaust, and found part of itself occupied for 40 years by a brutal Soviet overlord are now convinced that all their problems are the fault of. . . a tiny minority of Muslim immigrants, most of whom only entered the country in the past few years? These citizens apparently believe so much in the sanctity and superiority of German values that they now hunt these immigrants in the streets in order to beat and bloody them, or attend rallies alongside those who participate in such activities.
One can only imagine the moral turpitude of any German who, faced with his or her country’s history, looks at the model of Nazism and thinks, “Hey, that sounds pretty good to me.”
This deranged and violent response by German protestors ironically defeats the participants’ own claims that the German race is special and needs to exclude outside influences. If ever a country needed to let in fresh cultural air and extirpate notions of national purity, Germany is that country. It’s significant, and may offer some hope, that these protests are happening in East Germany, which until 1990 was not part of modern Germany and its democratic institutions and culture, and is a part of the country that suffered Soviet occupation until 1990.
The bad faith of the German right is in plain view. The demonization and, on the farther fringes, outright violence against primarily Muslim immigrants, tells the story. Faced with a group of people that the German state itself has allowed into the country, the right turns a political issue that might be resolved by normal political dialogue and decision-making into an existential threat to the German state — not with the intent of fixing the problem, but of exasperating it with the goal of transforming the nature of German society and politics itself in an illiberal direction.
In the case of Germany, a simple mental exercise helps clarify the situation. Let’s say that a new German government decided to completely reverse the liberalized refugee policies of recent years, and went so far as to expel the million newcomers. Is there any doubt that this would hardly satisfy the nativist forces who claimed to want this outcome? Rather, it seems more likely to me that these forces would continue hunting for new enemies to demonize and blame for their troubles. Once they run out of Muslims, what religious minority might they target next?
The attempt to paint all immigrants as violent based on the acts of a few significantly parallels President Trump’s strategy to do the same to Latino immigrants to the United States. There is a logic to the contemporary right-wing, white supremacist playbook that reaches now to both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a right-wing populism that at its core defines a legitimate, deserving us (aka “The People”) in opposition to a parasitic, undeserving other. In Germany as in the United States, the relatively weak position of immigrants in comparison to the power of the state and its citizens is rhetorically reversed, so that the immigrants are seen as all-powerful and the vast majority as weak and under dire threat.
What we are witnessing in Germany is not just a challenge to that country, but a challenge to the United States as well. We lost many thousands of lives extirpating fascism from Europe during World War II, and the idea that the inheritors of this sick world view are now on the march, even in small numbers, should resolve all Americans to do what they can to support the great majority of decent and democratically-minded Germans against this threat. Without any legitimate or helpful way to intervene directly in a challenge that Germans must resolve on their own, there is one vital means by which Americans can support the resistance against this Teutonic illiberalism: vote out Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, and stop their efforts to impose a nativist, anti-immigrant vision on the United States. The far right in Germany should not be able to look to the United States for moral support of its retrograde agenda; instead, Germans should be able to look to the United States as an example of a democracy that’s stronger for its multiculturalism and humanitarianism, not weaker.