The heinous murder of the CDU politician Walter Lübcke, allegedly committed by a right-wing extremist, has triggered another witch-hunt against the AfD, against alleged xenophobes and against the right in general, whereby the ‘right-wing’ curse hits all those who openly dare to be at odds with Merkel’s policies. The lightning speed with which the familiar smear and hunting mechanism was set in motion in an as yet unexplained situation is an indication that the bloody deed was merely the welcome excuse for another exorcism exercise.

The Right is the “cancer of our free society,” which requires “clear countermeasures,” tweeted eco-entrepreneur Sina Trinkwalder. Former CDU Secretary General Ruprecht Polenz called the right-wing ‘Junge Freiheit’ newspaper a “right-wing radical oil stain” that “pollutes the democratic groundwater.” The has-been SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel, who lacks the natural prerequisites for his aspired second career as a political thinker, wants places of right-wing discourses to be “dug out.”

Seehofer makes himself a lackey

All the established media are forming a closed assault gun phalanx ‘against the Right.’ Jasper von Altenbockum, who is out of his depth as chief editor of domestic politics at the pro-Merkel newspaper FAZ, calls for “ostracism” and “intolerance” vis-à-vis the AfD and for legal proceedings against “sympathizers.”

The quoted ‘Stürmer’ vocabulary is typical. With constant simplicity of mind, the smear and attack campaigns are steadily increasing in intensity and brutality. Another former Secretary General of the CDU, Peter Tauber, wants to withdraw “decisive fundamental rights such as the right to freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of teaching, freedom of assembly, the right to property and even the privacy of letters, post and telecommunications” from convicted enemies of democracy. This has, in part, long since been common practice.

Anyone who shows himself to be an opponent of open borders is effectively deprived of freedom of assembly and expression, of peace and even of the right to physical safety. Tauber's proposal amounts to transferring to state competence the proto-state actions of anti-fascist storm-troopers and to thus increasing their efficiency. Apparently, he’s striking a chord that is widespread in the political-media complex. Interior and Constitutional Minister Horst Seehofer, who denounced the “rule of injustice” after Merkel’s opening of the border, now makes himself their lackey and expressly agrees with the strategy of escalation.

The Gravediggers of Democracy

Should the plans become reality, a distinction will have to be made between ‘citizens of the Federal Republic’ who are endowed with ‘correct’ convictions and full rights on the one hand, and on the other, mere ‘citizens’ who are endowed with ‘false’ convictions and correspondingly fewer rights. The latter would form a class of Helots, which one may plunder arbitrarily and publicly parade. Because once the horror has got going, it will become self-perpetuating.

Those who claim to be defenders of democracy in reality do everything they can to block the free, fair, public forming of opinion and majority. To this end they refer to ‘values’ – which are often only a cover for low motives and personal egoisms – and draw from these a dictatorial right of intervention.

These are signs of acute panic in the political-media complex. Germany has also been comprehensively affected by the Europe-wide collapse of the old party systems, especially the formerly large ‘Volksparteien’ (people’s parties). In view of what they have done, the established politicians and media representatives are unable to legitimize themselves rationally, argumentatively, in short: in a genuinely democratic sense. They are refuted by the imported Islamic terror threat, the extensive clan rule, the imploring request of the Munich police to the Turkish consul general to ask his compatriots to exercise self-control in public.

Cold Civil War

In order to prove nevertheless their ability to act, they hit out at a bugbear as the supposed source of the problems and stir up a cold civil war. It is pointless to push back against this with cogent reasons. In the interests of one’s own mental sanity, it would be a good idea to see the current campaign as a new exacerbation of a disease. The deeper cause of the disease lies less in the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 under foreign guardianship, than in the intellectual post hoc constitution of the Federal Republic by the Frankfurt School, which is symbolically marked by ‘1968.’

Accordingly, this state is no longer understood as a political form of organization that secures the inner and outer freedom of (the) Germans. Instead, it is ideologically declaimed as the ‘explicit counter-model’ to the Third Reich. This dogmatic fixation on a totalitarian system, which has now also been confirmed by the supreme court, and the permanent “critical working through of the Nazi past, the constant self-confrontation with this theme” (Alexander Mitscherlich), have by no means led to catharsis, to moral purification, but via the intermediate step of total self-empowerment in the name of doing good to a re-implementation of totalitarian ways of thinking and behaving.

The ‘Stürmer’ vocabulary and the pogrom mood we are experiencing right now are not a random overheating of the situation, they are systemic. The periodic exacerbation of hysteria are the self- congratulation and self-assurances of a mis-conditioned state and a neuroticized society. The third German ideological state has begun to strip away its parliamentary, constitutional and liberal layers and to release its neo-totalitarian potential.

Originally written in German for 'Junge Freiheit', where the article appeared under the title 'Akute Panik der Etablierten', on June 29th 2019.