Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
This appears to be blatant misinformation. They want to expel various noncitizens and remove or restrict various pathways to citizenship. It's important not to misrepresent others even when you vehemently disagree with them.
There are other (voices in other) parties that want to expel/restrict foreigners. There is a spectrum, and the AfD holds a rather large portion of the people tentatively agreeing with what you call misrepresentation.
How many people of their party must make such statements while being welcome in the party, for it to not be misinformation/misrepresentation.
I mean, yeah. They push some things that would help - to sell its ideas to peole, but in the end if they got to power they would tripple down and do horrible things.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
the party program doesn't state it, but some high figures were caught talking about it. E.g. Björn Höcke and Maximilian Krah. They did not mention "brown people" as gp states, but called out people foreign to the local culture.
Throwing out citizens because of some birth attribute they can not influence could be seen as inhumane.
Would you think it's ok to throw out everybody with a certain eye color?
But then it needs to be defined what is local culture and what is foreign. And people would need to get the same treatment independently of their background. That is not what the AfD argues.
The claim was that they want to deport citizens. The above list does not contain any entries that correspond to citizens. So unless you believe the above list to be incomplete or somehow otherwise in error it is a sound refutation of the original claim.
I'm inclined to vouch for the comment however I'm not clear if the self admitted AI copy and paste is in keeping with the current HN guidelines.
My bad, that does change things. Somewhat surprising that they would include that item as it alone tips the legal scales against them dramatically.
I was skeptical enough to look over the linked correctiv article and I notice that while those contacted are generally quoted as dodging most of the other questions they invariably come out against expulsion of legal citizens.
> And all those who campaigned for refugees could go there, too.
Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article? Because this sellner character is approaching comic book villain level in their portrayal of him and thus I find myself not wanting to take the word of a single outlet.
I'm from the country Sellner is from - the same country Hitler was from! - and he is indeed comic book villain levels of evil. For example, he was in contact with the Christchurch shooter before he committed his terrorist acts.
Just read his Wikipedia article [0] and you'll find out more about his character, like this gem:
> Sellner said that Jews were a problem in the 1920s and made references to the "Jewish question"
> Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article?
Correctiv is a non-profit investigative journalism outlet that managed to infiltrate this secretive far-right meeting.
They are known to be gold-standard levels of credible and have won a ton of journalism prizes. It's not exactly yellow press.
Due to the very nature of it being a secretive meeting, their reporting is exclusive. Obviously the neonazis want to put on a nice face, so they didn't exactly invite Reuters to their lets-plot-deportations-of-foreign-born-citizens meeting.
To quote his ideological companion from across the pond, Nick Fuentes :
> This is why I tell people, hide your power level. OK? You're not hiding your power level if you're in a group chat with hundreds of people saying we're going to put people in gas chambers. OK, guys?
[1]
My intent wasn't to ask about that specific meeting but rather about the reported positions of the individuals involved. No matter how reputable I wouldn't want to take a single source as fact when the claim is that someone secretly holds reprehensible views in private that contradict what he says in public.
Setting aside the other attendees wikipedia more than covers sellner in that regard.
"Hiding your power levels" is a key strategy of the neofascist right. Make yourself look reasonable until you have enough power to do the despicable.
This explains why they are publicly denying what they are plotting in private.
Here's some choice quotes, translated to English.
"We must proceed completely peacefully and deliberately, adapt if necessary and butter up the opponent [literally: smear honey on their mouths], but when we are finally ready, we will put them all against the wall. (...) Dig a pit, all in and quicklime on top."
-- Holger Arppe, former AfD Vice Chair [0]
"The worse Germany is doing, the better it is for the AfD. [...] Therefore we have to consider a tactic between: How bad can things get for Germany? And: How much can we provoke? [...] Because then the AfD does better. We can always just shoot them all later. That's not an issue at all. Or gas them, or however you want. I don't care!"
-- Christian Lüth, AfD Press spokesman [1]
"It doesn't matter, nothing will change, even if we were to eat chalk [act harmless]. Even if we said: yes, we are separating from X, Y and Z now and acting moderate here."
Based on the political extremes in the US I had figured AfD would have its share of somewhat unsavory characters but this is almost comical. Are you sure the germans haven't confused meeting minutes and disney scripts? (I say, but then look at who we managed to elect.)
Yeah, as bad as unsavory characters in the US are, the AfD is full of straight-up, unrepetent Neonazis.
Like this is not just me mischaracterizing my political opponents, it is the most accurate label based on their behavior. They're the type of people who want to make the 1930s happen again in Germany.
This is why I react somewhat strongly when people try to relativize their abhorrence and make excuses, most frequently out of incorrectly mapping their own country's political systems.
I hope I could convince you that - especially given Germany's past and its commitment to never let this happen again - banning them is not some sort of political repression, but an immune response from democracy under attack. It is a manifestation of defensive democracy [0] , the principle written into the German constitution after the horrors of fascism.
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis in high ranking positions and actively covering this up is very much the exception the world over.
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
I think ideally, one would nip those fascist movements in the bud before they become big enough to be problematic. There's a phrase in German antifascism - "Wehret den Anfängen!", translating to "resist the beginnings". The Nazi movement itself also became really difficult to stop once it had some serious traction, one has to really stop these movements from becoming this big in the first place.
Problem is, the German Verfassungsschutz (lit. "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution", the domestic intelligence agency) was itself infiltrated by the far-right [0] and so didn't ring the alarm in time.
I agree with you that there's probably no way to come out unscathed from trying to ban them now - their followers are already radicalized and it probably wouldn't be pretty. But that being said, what else should we do? Just do nothing and let it all happen once more? Break our promise of never again? Watch history repeat itself? No - we have to at least try.
Germany has been very bad at resisting the beginnings. The actual Nazis seemed just kinda unfriendly and not that bad until suddenly they were that bad. There was a ten year buildup until the Holocaust.
Your quote is very different from the situation you describe. Revoking citizenship is different than no pathway to citizenship. A pathway to citizenship is not open doors.
Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it. Why should America and Europe hold themselves up to such naive, idealistic standards with Middle Eastern countries around who aren't doing the same?
That's essentially the point you made, while conflating pulling the rug out from under people's feet because they've committed the crime of being brown with never having made the offer in the first place.
> Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it
Because living in these countries usually comes with significant downsides for minorities. E.g. most middle east countries are limiting freedom for women compared to men.
The overwhelming majority of countries around the world have processes for naturalization [1]. They are often fairly onerous, but that is true of many European countries as well.
AFD is reactonary party, russian trojan horse, that just feeds on the Germanys government total failure to listen to its peoples needs.
Russia has of course a stake in using E2E, to communicate with their paid actors. But that does not diminish peoples right for privacy. We have a lot of info about russias mingeling but we still do nothing about it. No private chat needed.
> Political groups are factions of the Parliament, while parties are alliances of national parties at EU level, funded through the EU budget. Neither the group in the Parliament nor the lawmakers will face any consequence if ESN loses its status as a European party.
It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.
Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.
I don't know how the procedure for banning a europarty looks but in Germany the bar is very high. It must be against the core constitutional values (human dignity, freedom, democracy) and pose a threat to that (infamously NPD was not banned as it was found to small to pose a threat).
The procedure here seems to be similar to Germany that the parliament can only request a review from an independent body (in Germany the constitutional court) if this is the case, the actual decision comes from that body after a lengthy process.
Behind the europarty is (among others) the AfD for which the public has been debating for years now on wether to attempt to ban them because of their danger, so it doesn't seem very far fetched for their EU party really.
This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To say this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an
opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands
and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry:
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And
many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want
to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge
simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with?
I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered
cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees
this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the
AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here,
no good ones.
I think the groups pushing for these laws are largely right neoliberals. Historically, while being nominally in competition with both far-right and left, they have found it much easier to compromise with the right or mobilize against the left.
It's probably safer for them to be vague about who exactly they mean. Both to stay legal and to give voters the chance to project whichever people they hate most onto that policy.
Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
Belgium can revoke citizenship of dual nationals on certain ground. What off it?
What are the certain grounds?
Democracy, as long as everyone votes for what you want, right?
This appears to be blatant misinformation. They want to expel various noncitizens and remove or restrict various pathways to citizenship. It's important not to misrepresent others even when you vehemently disagree with them.
There are other (voices in other) parties that want to expel/restrict foreigners. There is a spectrum, and the AfD holds a rather large portion of the people tentatively agreeing with what you call misrepresentation.
How many people of their party must make such statements while being welcome in the party, for it to not be misinformation/misrepresentation.
I mean, yeah. They push some things that would help - to sell its ideas to peole, but in the end if they got to power they would tripple down and do horrible things.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
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the party program doesn't state it, but some high figures were caught talking about it. E.g. Björn Höcke and Maximilian Krah. They did not mention "brown people" as gp states, but called out people foreign to the local culture.
What's so undemocratic if current inhabitants of some land do not want foreign culture influence in their society?
Who said it's undemocratic?
Throwing out citizens because of some birth attribute they can not influence could be seen as inhumane. Would you think it's ok to throw out everybody with a certain eye color?
You said "foreign culture", now you are moving goalposts. Culture is not birth attribute.
ok fair, I interpreted their language.
But then it needs to be defined what is local culture and what is foreign. And people would need to get the same treatment independently of their background. That is not what the AfD argues.
>people would need to get the same treatment independently of their background
This point of view is seems actually widely represented in German politics
>That is not what the AfD argues.
Ironically AfD leader is a lesbian married with immigrant Sri-lankian woman, so I doubt your claims.
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I see nothing here rebuking the above claim. Maybe you would’ve had better luck coming up with something if you had bothered to write it yourself.
The claim was that they want to deport citizens. The above list does not contain any entries that correspond to citizens. So unless you believe the above list to be incomplete or somehow otherwise in error it is a sound refutation of the original claim.
I'm inclined to vouch for the comment however I'm not clear if the self admitted AI copy and paste is in keeping with the current HN guidelines.
did your AI train on the Potsdam meeting notes that leaked to journalists?
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Maybe don't trust AI so much.
Obviously the fascists don't put their most odious ideas in writing, they plan them in secret instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/turmoil-in-ger...
> discuss removing asylum seekers
Those aren't citizens though? I don't agree with their ideals but lets please be honest about what they do and don't support.
> asylum seekers and German citizens of foreign origin deemed to have failed to integrate.
Read just a little bit more of the article ;)
My bad, that does change things. Somewhat surprising that they would include that item as it alone tips the legal scales against them dramatically.
I was skeptical enough to look over the linked correctiv article and I notice that while those contacted are generally quoted as dodging most of the other questions they invariably come out against expulsion of legal citizens.
> And all those who campaigned for refugees could go there, too.
Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article? Because this sellner character is approaching comic book villain level in their portrayal of him and thus I find myself not wanting to take the word of a single outlet.
I'm from the country Sellner is from - the same country Hitler was from! - and he is indeed comic book villain levels of evil. For example, he was in contact with the Christchurch shooter before he committed his terrorist acts.
Just read his Wikipedia article [0] and you'll find out more about his character, like this gem:
> Sellner said that Jews were a problem in the 1920s and made references to the "Jewish question"
> Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article?
Correctiv is a non-profit investigative journalism outlet that managed to infiltrate this secretive far-right meeting. They are known to be gold-standard levels of credible and have won a ton of journalism prizes. It's not exactly yellow press.
Due to the very nature of it being a secretive meeting, their reporting is exclusive. Obviously the neonazis want to put on a nice face, so they didn't exactly invite Reuters to their lets-plot-deportations-of-foreign-born-citizens meeting.
To quote his ideological companion from across the pond, Nick Fuentes :
> This is why I tell people, hide your power level. OK? You're not hiding your power level if you're in a group chat with hundreds of people saying we're going to put people in gas chambers. OK, guys? [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sellner [1] https://www.mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/nick-fuentes-...
My intent wasn't to ask about that specific meeting but rather about the reported positions of the individuals involved. No matter how reputable I wouldn't want to take a single source as fact when the claim is that someone secretly holds reprehensible views in private that contradict what he says in public.
Setting aside the other attendees wikipedia more than covers sellner in that regard.
"Hiding your power levels" is a key strategy of the neofascist right. Make yourself look reasonable until you have enough power to do the despicable.
This explains why they are publicly denying what they are plotting in private.
Here's some choice quotes, translated to English.
"We must proceed completely peacefully and deliberately, adapt if necessary and butter up the opponent [literally: smear honey on their mouths], but when we are finally ready, we will put them all against the wall. (...) Dig a pit, all in and quicklime on top."
-- Holger Arppe, former AfD Vice Chair [0]
"The worse Germany is doing, the better it is for the AfD. [...] Therefore we have to consider a tactic between: How bad can things get for Germany? And: How much can we provoke? [...] Because then the AfD does better. We can always just shoot them all later. That's not an issue at all. Or gas them, or however you want. I don't care!"
-- Christian Lüth, AfD Press spokesman [1]
"It doesn't matter, nothing will change, even if we were to eat chalk [act harmless]. Even if we said: yes, we are separating from X, Y and Z now and acting moderate here."
-- Hans-Christoph Berndt, AfD Brandenburg senate leader [2]
[0] https://taz.de/Frueherer-AfD-Fraktionsvize-verurteilt/!56167... [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/afd-sprecher-wollte-fluc... [2] https://mik.brandenburg.de/sixcms/media.php/9/Einstufungsver...
Based on the political extremes in the US I had figured AfD would have its share of somewhat unsavory characters but this is almost comical. Are you sure the germans haven't confused meeting minutes and disney scripts? (I say, but then look at who we managed to elect.)
Yeah, as bad as unsavory characters in the US are, the AfD is full of straight-up, unrepetent Neonazis.
Like this is not just me mischaracterizing my political opponents, it is the most accurate label based on their behavior. They're the type of people who want to make the 1930s happen again in Germany.
This is why I react somewhat strongly when people try to relativize their abhorrence and make excuses, most frequently out of incorrectly mapping their own country's political systems.
I hope I could convince you that - especially given Germany's past and its commitment to never let this happen again - banning them is not some sort of political repression, but an immune response from democracy under attack. It is a manifestation of defensive democracy [0] , the principle written into the German constitution after the horrors of fascism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis in high ranking positions and actively covering this up is very much the exception the world over.
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
I think ideally, one would nip those fascist movements in the bud before they become big enough to be problematic. There's a phrase in German antifascism - "Wehret den Anfängen!", translating to "resist the beginnings". The Nazi movement itself also became really difficult to stop once it had some serious traction, one has to really stop these movements from becoming this big in the first place.
Problem is, the German Verfassungsschutz (lit. "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution", the domestic intelligence agency) was itself infiltrated by the far-right [0] and so didn't ring the alarm in time.
I agree with you that there's probably no way to come out unscathed from trying to ban them now - their followers are already radicalized and it probably wouldn't be pretty. But that being said, what else should we do? Just do nothing and let it all happen once more? Break our promise of never again? Watch history repeat itself? No - we have to at least try.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Maa%C3%9Fen
Germany has been very bad at resisting the beginnings. The actual Nazis seemed just kinda unfriendly and not that bad until suddenly they were that bad. There was a ten year buildup until the Holocaust.
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Your quote is very different from the situation you describe. Revoking citizenship is different than no pathway to citizenship. A pathway to citizenship is not open doors.
a country can change its mind though
Especially by voting in a party that says it will do it. That's democracy, right?
Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it. Why should America and Europe hold themselves up to such naive, idealistic standards with Middle Eastern countries around who aren't doing the same?
That's essentially the point you made, while conflating pulling the rug out from under people's feet because they've committed the crime of being brown with never having made the offer in the first place.
> Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it
Because living in these countries usually comes with significant downsides for minorities. E.g. most middle east countries are limiting freedom for women compared to men.
What countries can do is pretty expansive and unrelated to whether or not they're comparable to other things or good things for countries to do.
The overwhelming majority of countries around the world have processes for naturalization [1]. They are often fairly onerous, but that is true of many European countries as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization#Summary_by_coun...
AFD is reactonary party, russian trojan horse, that just feeds on the Germanys government total failure to listen to its peoples needs. Russia has of course a stake in using E2E, to communicate with their paid actors. But that does not diminish peoples right for privacy. We have a lot of info about russias mingeling but we still do nothing about it. No private chat needed.
> Political groups are factions of the Parliament, while parties are alliances of national parties at EU level, funded through the EU budget. Neither the group in the Parliament nor the lawmakers will face any consequence if ESN loses its status as a European party.
It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.
Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.
Unless they are doing something criminal their values are their and their voters business, regardless of how reprehensible they might be.
I don't know how the procedure for banning a europarty looks but in Germany the bar is very high. It must be against the core constitutional values (human dignity, freedom, democracy) and pose a threat to that (infamously NPD was not banned as it was found to small to pose a threat).
The procedure here seems to be similar to Germany that the parliament can only request a review from an independent body (in Germany the constitutional court) if this is the case, the actual decision comes from that body after a lengthy process.
Behind the europarty is (among others) the AfD for which the public has been debating for years now on wether to attempt to ban them because of their danger, so it doesn't seem very far fetched for their EU party really.
In Germany it is illegal to have Nazi-like values, such as wanting to expel all non-German people.
Is it illegal too to expel non-citizens? IIRC the issue is primarily wanting to expel certain citizens.
Saying that AfD "is an opponent of chat control" is like saying its more-or-less direct predecessor advocated for vegetarianism.
This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/11/l...
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To say this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with? I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here, no good ones.
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>All people are equal as far as the law is concerned, no matter their skin color, religion or origin
This is kinda vague, i.e. afaik German laws discriminate lonely people by taxing them more then married.
You do not need to be perfect to call out flaws in others
People in glass houses should be free to throw stones.
The party they want to ban are neo-Nazis.
I think the groups pushing for these laws are largely right neoliberals. Historically, while being nominally in competition with both far-right and left, they have found it much easier to compromise with the right or mobilize against the left.
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Are you coming here to spread Russian propaganda? Please don't.
If you want to expel the Jews from Germany you're a Nazi. It could not possibly be more direct than that.
Is afd supporting that idea?
They support expelling certain ethnic and religious groups from Germany, but it's not clear if the Jews are one.
It's probably safer for them to be vague about who exactly they mean. Both to stay legal and to give voters the chance to project whichever people they hate most onto that policy.
Look at the official party stance, he is spreading misinformation.
Why would you look at what they say officially, instead of what they do