cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17805513

While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.

The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.

So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.

In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.

But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.

    • masquenox@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If the truth tires you, I suggest you work on your intelectual stamina - yours isn’t fit for purpose.

      Here’s some more truth to get you started - the USSR was about as “socialist” as the US is “democratic.” Ie, the media and the politicians constantly blast these concepts out as mere buzzwords at full volume, but nobody gets to actually see anything like it in reality that can be called such with a straight face.

      Welcome to the real world.

      • Kaboom@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        I have plenty, I just dont use a lot of it on “not true communism” arguments

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I have plenty,

          No. You don’t. Your political understanding is based on sloganeering and gaslighting, not actual political ideology.

          It’s still your choice, of course… you can choose to stick to the comfortable lies Reagan and Thatcher told you and continue to live in a bubble of privilege and paranoia, or you can actually start making sense of what is happening around you.