Antifascism: Expanding Democracy | nd-aktuell.de

After 1945, there was a comprehensive de-realization of the reality of the “Third Reich” in occupied Germany – including twelve years of one’s own life. When it came to the monstrous atrocities in the wake of the “National Uprising” of 1933, no one wanted to be responsible, and so suddenly there were no more Nazis. Since then they have appeared masked, as “non-Nazis”. And so the silent majority and its state have so far been unable to fight them.

This applied and applies to the recurring attempts to found successor organizations to the Nazis; and it applied to the 1990s, in which the reunited West and East Germans learned to tolerate each other, but their hatred was directed against the “others”, refugees and migrants, and led to more than 100 unpunished murders. Even when the “Zwickau cell” of the “National Socialist Underground” re-enacted a piece of everyday Nazi life for the police and the public between 2000 and 2006 with their series of murders – directed against migrants – the police and the population resisted the repetition for as long as possible. Recognizing the old horrors that were commonplace during the Hitler years in this public re-enactment.

And so in 2024 we will be confronted in Germany with a veritable fascist organization that has 48,000 members and for which up to a fifth of those eligible to vote vote. A decade after its founding, it has become the second largest party, although its stated goals include the abolition of the parliamentary system and a “homogenization” of the population through mass deportations. The supposedly defensive democracy finances the Nazi party like everyone else and does not dare to ban it. Instead of fighting the fire, the German majority party CDU/CSU and the FDP are acting as a “firewall” and are quietly preparing for future center-right coalitions in a “realpolitik” manner, i.e. for the sake of maintaining power.

For 100 years, parliamentary-capitalist democracies have figured as antitheses to “totalitarianism.” Two of these “totalitarian” movements and regimes, which temporarily made pacts with each other and ultimately ruined each other in the Second World War, have long since become frowned upon (and therefore often imitated) models. They fulfilled contradictory political-economic functions: If fascism “saved” private property and the nation state from the workers’ movement, Stalinism was concerned with the defense of the revolutionary nationalized means of production and with bureaucratic control over the economy and society. Both regimes – with the GPU and the Gestapo – developed enormous repressive apparatuses that were fatally similar to each other. The decisive analogy of the two “classic” totalitarianisms, however, was the delusion – common to both leadership and followers – that their (utopian) goal could (only) be achieved if that tenth or fifth of the population in their area of ​​control who they viewed as unsuitable or as a “saboteur” of the desired progress would be interned, deported or killed.

In Germany, the script for the rise of a fascist party – with the support of financial and industrial capitalists and with the backing of the army – and that of the expansion of its reign of terror should be well known; but it is hard to forget. Those interested are firmly opposed to drawing lessons for the present from this fatal history. But that’s exactly what the fascists do – of course in their own way. They know that their hour will come when the authorities and defenders of parliamentary democracy fail to deal with the crisis. And since it is the business of the Christian and Social Democrats to manage crises, but not to combat their causes (which would only be possible with the help of anti-capitalist reforms), fascists offer themselves as crisis managers who can replace an authoritarian regime want to set parliamentary standards and promise security and prosperity to the remaining Germans (of ethnically impeccable origins) after the expulsion of many millions of “foreigners”.

Before 1933, the millions of votes for the socialist-oriented workers’ parties were seen as guarantors of parliamentary democracy, which their members and sympathizers had fought for. Unfortunately, in 1933 this proved to be a misjudgment. Today’s pro-capitalist social democracy and trade unions are hardly prepared to rescue representative democracy. They do not have their forward defense, i.e. their foundation through democratization of the economy, in their program. After the “uprising of the decent people” proclaimed by Gerhard Schröder a quarter of a century ago has long been forgotten, the spontaneous urban mass demonstrations “against the right” in January and February in the Federal Republic and Austria showed who would be willing and able to do so in an emergency to counter fascist danger and defend the democratic way of life. It was the largest spontaneous, extra-parliamentary movement of the post-war period: more than three million people protested for weeks on the streets and squares of their cities against the AfD and its “identitarian” ideologues. Nobody called them, nobody organized them.

And the spokesmen of the major parties who hastened to join these demonstrations suspected that this spontaneous mass protest was a vote of no confidence directed against politicians who are responsible for restricting the right to asylum and who – in view of the refugees and migrants from the war and hunger deserts of our world – nothing else comes to mind than: “We finally have to deport on a large scale!” What was going on in the AfD had remained hidden from the deportation politicians, who were oriented towards survey data, until the journalists from the Correctiv research center published their report on a secret meeting of the AfD -officials, fascist ideologues and donors (which took place in a Potsdam country hotel at the end of November 2023).

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back of concern about renewed fascism. And the three million who took to the streets on this occasion showed that they are no longer indulging in the collective refusal to believe the truth and are no longer content with ritualized commemoration of the Holocaust, but have understood that it is The AfD and its followers are a new totalitarian movement.

Now it is the task of the radical reformist and anti-capitalist oriented groups to prevent this new, spontaneous protest movement – of the kind we last saw in (West) Germany with the students, pupils and apprentices of 1968 – from fizzling out without consequences . All organizations affected because they are at risk should work together, regardless of their special interests and orientations, District groups “against the right” to form people who not only prepare demonstrations, but also take into their own hands the civil protection of endangered groups of people and institutions (refugee quarters, synagogues, mosques, churches…). An (internationally networked) Committee to fight against the AfD and “identitarians” should be brought into being, which publishes a bulletin in large numbers and publishes it on the Internet, in which the politics of the AfD are documented and analyzed week after week. The non-partisan initiative by members of the Bundestag for a Ban on the AfD should be supported because this party pursues the totalitarian project of securing the “survival of the German nation,” which its ideologists believe is at risk, by deporting millions of immigrant and “insufficiently assimilated” citizens. If in 1933 the Nazis considered “the Jews” to be “our” misfortune, today it is said to be all those who do not have German grandparents.

Today’s disguised Nazis must be publicly called Nazis and fought as such. The recruitment and Training of police officers, soldiers and teachers must be fundamentally changed in order to enable these professional groups to defend parliamentary institutions instead of turning into collaborators in their destruction (as they once did).

The few democratic republics can only be saved internationally if the forces defending them adopt a radical approach Reform program develop something that is understandable to the majority. It must move from the fight against poverty to the right to work, from the four-day week to the sliding wage scale (to ensure an acceptable standard of living) and further to the right to publicly financed housing, healthcare and education for all. This program is directed against the private appropriation of social wealth, i.e. against the source of all political power (and its securing through corruption); it presupposes the fixing of wealth and income limits.

Because in 2024 the same applies as in 1924: If it is not possible to expand parliamentary democracy into an economic democracy and to open a path to self-government for the population, which has always only been managed and “represented”, then the (new) fascists will be the “left behind”, the “left behind”, Once again, the “insecure” and the “offended” are gathered together into a following that will soon put an end to democracy and human rights.

Helmut Dahmer is a social philosopher and lives in Vienna. From 1974 to 2002 he was professor of sociology in Darmstadt.