- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
Mainstream politicians express alarm while lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt welcomes congratulations from Elon Musk
Mainstream politicians around Europe have expressed alarm after the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) swept to a historic state election victory in Germany, while nationalist figures cheered the result as a mandate for change.
While falling just short of an absolute majority, the AfD surged into first place in the Saxony-Anhalt state election on Sunday, exit polls showed, putting the far right within reach of power at the state level for the first time since the second world war.
Strangely quiet from all those who are pissing on the US “YOU GUYS DO SOMETHING”, yeah?
Well, here’s your chance, for the ones of those who are like the above but who are in Germany: DO SOMETHING NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN. OR at least shut the fuck up about the US and our struggles to overcome fascism.
(I’m venting about those specific assholes, not Germans struggling to fight against this rightwing surge, I hope that’s clear)
You have to understand the brief history of Germany since the WWII to grasp the full picture. In a nutshell, once East and West Germany were formed, that locked people in to essentially different systems. Once the wall fell, Germany was reunited. However, the East vs West dynamic in terms of poverty and voting, the West is largely paid more and has is liberal leaning, while the east side of Germany is still quite impoverish, so they vote for the AfD because they seem to be telling the people what they want to hear.
It’s essentially very similar to how the US is blue vs red. Cites are blue, while the rural parts are red. Germany is blue on the west, and red on the east due to Germany splitting and reunifying.
Also similar to how the Union and the Confederacy split and reformed and those problems never got fixed because we didn’t hold anyone accountable and didn’t invest in improving the lives of average citizens.
I’m so tired
Same, my friend, same.
American reading a global News story: “how can I make this about me, while also justifying my inaction?”
Aye, I’ve fought those assholes on Lemmy. They are a poison to us all.
We’re in this together, all of us. Every citizen in this world. The fascists must be defeated.
This is a global class war.
Unfortunately the owner class is faster in organizing globally than the workers… but we’ll ctach up eventually.
The bigger they get, the harder they will be to remove until it’s too late. All the deadlock over the last few years about whether they should or shouldn’t ban them has allowed them to balloon to this size. The best time for action was yesterday, the second best is today. Don’t let the Nazis take over again.
You can ban the group, but you can’t ban the ideas or support that led to it.
The other parties need to take an honest look at themselves and ask why people would support a party like that over themselves.
This x1000. Instead of taking a step back and trying to figure out how they lost to an orange cheeto, the dems in the U.S. decided to blame everyone except themselves.
Maybe the other parties in Germany should think about how they could lose to a nazi party, and make adjustments.
So it goes…
Well, i’m out at every opportunity to join any protest against the far-right in my region, even if i have to drive half an hour to get to it or take a day off from work. Last time i marched with a wild mix of people through half the town, blocking most of a major entry road to the inner city, in protest against the AfD having their meet and greet. I’m also member of a union.
And i’m still gonna criticise 'Muricans for not doing enough. At this point protesting alone might not be enough. I’m not saying you should turn to violence, but you absolutely should unionise more and coordinate massive shutdowns all over the country. People managed to do that in the past, and at that time they didn’t even have the convenience of instant communication across the globe. Those worker’s rights didn’t come for free.
No offense, but this sentence alone shows just how disconnected you are from the struggles of Americans
As i said, those rights didn’t come for free. There was a time when they didn’t exist here or anywhere in Europe. Sometimes they were gained by strikes and peaceful protests, sometimes it took a more drastic turn.
No, you still don’t get it. Many, possibly most Americans cannot choose to take a day off of work for something like going to a protest. No extra money and/or they’ll get disciplined at work and possibly fired.
What makes you think that was any different in 19th / early 20th century Europe?
As much as I want to be on your side, I gotta mostly agree with the other guy here: Europeans have the advantage of a very high population density overall, especially compared to America. I don’t know where you’re from but taking the Fremch as an example because they live and breathe protesting and revolutions, they could (and have) gather a MASSIVE protest of millions of people from all over the country in the span of just a few hours when they set their minds to it. Meanwhile, in the US, outside the small handful of cities everyone is familiar with (New York, Los Angeles, etc) the vast majority of us are spread out over
thousands of miles(1.61 x thousands) of kilometers in pockets too small to really have any effect at all.After some admitedly-quick research, the EU has about 100 million more people and a little less than half the land that the US has. These two compounding factors alone make it MUCH easier to facilitate any kind of social change on your side of the pond, but that’s not even including factors like our complete lack of any REAL public infrastructure, harsher work-life balance by every metric, and (though I could be wrong here) a generally pro-union culture whereas our unions have been demonized to Hell and back (pun intended) for at least the previous 150 years
Yes, i understand the US is big. But let’s take a look where most of the American people actually are, shall we?
Idk about you, but i see no problem here. You have a massive population center in the east, and one in the west. With some spread across the eastern half. You have internet, you have instant communication. You don’t need the entire country. You only need a critical mass of people shutting down the most important population centres. And yes, there is precedence for that in the history of other countries. Look at Russia. The most densely populated areas happen to be on the European continent. That’s the area that was always the most critical when it came to uprisings. Sure, it didn’t work out for them, but hey, you’re not Russians. So there is a chance.
That, i can agree with. I don’t see the size as a problem, it’s rather the propaganda that is affecting all sides involved. The Maga cult is obvious. But the opposing sides are also being actively discouraged. Your people have a lot more power in their hands than they seem to know. Pretty much the same story as in every other country.
Mine doesn’t list a source (and it has very few pixels if you try to zoom in) so take it with a grain of salt, but they at least appear to be attempting to make it as close to a 1:1 comparison as possible. And I agree, we don’t need the whole country to mobilize as one, but let’s look at how the US has ~50 individual specks of purple separated by vast areas of white/tan/orange, even in the more well known states like New York, Texas, and California. Meanwhile, Europe is basically ALL purple and orange until you get to mountainous areas like the Scandinavian hinterland.
If I’m living in a small town in southern France and I want to protest, I could hop on the train and be in Paris in like, 6 hours at most. If I lived in a small town in let’s say, the (Eastern) Midwest and wanted to do the same in Washington DC, well public transport is already out of the question in the VAST majority of cases (trains here don’t visit small towns unless it’s for industrial reasons), so I’m gonna have to drive myself. 6 hour drive to DC puts my starting location somewhere around Columbus, Ohio (dead center of Ohio, but arguably not even in the Midwest depending on who you ask, or at least on the outer rim of it). Pretty much anything further west than that (2/3s of the country at least) and I’m looking at a multi-day investment just to GET to the protest, not to mention all the other shit that goes along with it. You could always try protesting at the State capitals, but those will automatically be lesser in size and effectiveness (no one cares if 1 out of 50 states is having problems, that’s literally happening all the time) and depending on my state, that might still be an all-day drive.
I like your idea of using the internet to help, but the reality of the situation is that without human bodies physically showing up, there’s no real incentive for DC to actually DO anything. There have been millions, possibly billions, of critical things said about Trump’s administration online, but that hasn’t changed anything for the better.
Lastly, like you said, we both agree that propoganda is one of the biggest obstacles here, but I don’t know how much we agree on us ‘having more power than we seem to know’. I’ve seen various estimates and each time the number seems to be increasing, but roughly HALF of all American households will be out of money if they go two or three months without a paycheck. Period. We have no social safety net. If you’re deemed ‘good enough to work’ then you better be working, otherwise you’re homeless which, in this country, might as well be a death sentence. Sure, there are a small handful of exceptions to this, but they put up so many roadblocks and hoops to jump through that trying to get on and stay on Welfare is basically a job in and of itself, and they will only provide you with the bare essentials; if you even think about one luxury good, that money disappears instantly.
As much as I hate to admit it, in America, the Capitalists have won for the time being and there’s really nothing to be done about it short of a complete overhaul of MOST of how this country operates
I appreciate your optimism, truly. But I wish you could try talking some sense into the average American on this topic. You would see quickly that we’re a long, long ways from the days of the west coast waterfront strike and things like that. Most have been brainwashed to believe that unions are a bad thing.
Yea…like Americans help…
HALF AN HOUR! I’m laughing I’m sorry. Half an hour! Holy fuck half an hour is like a trip to the grocery store in America.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/202408-AAAFTS-American-Driving-Survey-2023.pdf
Removed by mod
Oh look, a Nazi
Fuck off with protests. Holy fuck. They don’t do jack shit except give the opportunity for the organizers to fill their CV and collect them like those marathon running stickers on the back of a Volvo.
Fuck
This entire time the strategy was and only ever was to protest online. You protest by building networks and creating memes and identifying when people are paying millions to convince people on the left to go commit to the most high energy low retard efforts like it described where all of us have to drive 3 hrs just to get arrested and beat up.
The internet has literally been here the whole time. Turns the fuck out that the goal is protesting is actually what is done online every single fucking day. Go figure. Meanwhile we all left social media and chose the smallest corner of the internet to exist in crying about how bad everything is. Fucking hate it here. The left fucking suck.
And that’s the reason why i think that American propaganda not only effects the Maga cult. Because that’s exactly what they want you to think. They don’t want you to realise that you’re not alone. Going out to the streets can be an effective peaceful way to make your voice heard up until the point where more drastic actions are inevitable. In 2024 it lead to a significant drop in the polls for the AfD when massive protests erupted all over Germany due to their “remigration” plans. These protests should have kept going on, but sadly they didn’t. And sadly, certain media outlets kept pushing more propaganda in the time after.
One major reason for protests is to show the fellow countrymen and women what is acceptable in the society and what not. If you don’t react, you give them basically a free pass on being massive assholes. Turns out that Nazis don’t like it if they’re outed as Nazis. They tend to go back into their dark little shithole corners and cry about it.
Protesting online isn’t enough. Not by far. Especially if that place is absolutely filled to the brim with propagandists and bots. And politicians certainly don’t give a flying fuck about a bunch of basement dwellers crying on social media. They do care, if those people are out on the streets. That’s where people are the most inconvenient, because if people are on the streets, they have to spend time and money for organisation and police work. It binds resources. It blocks entry ways. If done right, it can shut down entire cities. And if those town’s leaders are smart, they join in on the protest, because that makes them being seen. That’s how my home town turned into a SPD stronghold in a state full of CSU voters.
Action starts at the lowest level in the immediate area. Not some fucking website filled with Russian, Chinese and Israeli bots.
Hey buddy, it’s me from that other comment about population density. I’m not going to get too detailed in this comment cause you’ve got a whole other thing going with that Melvin guy, but I just wanted to say congrats on seeing some success against the AfD and Nazis and I envy your opinion that peaceful protesting can still bring great short- and long-term benefits.
Unfortunately, I still think America is too far(-right) gone for something like that to work. 7 of the 10 largest protests in American history can be directly linked back to protesting against Trump (4 of the top 5 occurred just within the last 12 months, with the last one being the Women’s March of 2017 aka right as Trump’s first term started) and all of these have accomplished… well, nothing. Not a single damn thing. That’s 33 million people (if you do like I did and assume the highest estimate was 100% correct and there were no overlaps, so a highly unrealistic skew in their favor), just under 10% of the entire country peacefully protesting Trump at some point aaaaand nothing happened. Hell, most people probably don’t even remember a single one of the three seperate No Kings protests.
On the other hand, the Maga cult managed to storm the Capitol building with only about 2,000 protesters on Jan 6th 2021 (something like 0.0005% of the population) and even though they technically failed in their goal at the time, it had (and continues to have) FAR reaching effects on American politics. Several people died, hundreds injured, and exactly 0 negative consequences for the man who started it; Hell, he even managed to get reelected afterwards and pardon almost all of them anyway so it was really a net-positive for him by far.
We could have a good, long discussion about the ethics/morals of protesting peacefully in a vacuum, but at the end of the day, in reality, force speaks volumes. I’m not advocating we do the same and go all-in on violence right off the bat, but rather “force” which I’m defining here as “the willingness to defend one’s self or ideals with violence if necessary,” should not be shied away from. If we go in ‘protesting’ by standing on sidewalks with cardboard signs, nothing gets accomplished except leaving the road open for them to roll over us later. It is no coincidence that many of the greatest changes brought through history began as “civil disobedience” that began peacefully only to end in violence when (surprise) the State wanted to maintain the status quo. We may be hesitant to use force, they will not be so kind-hearted
Trump has spent the previous decade proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he cares only for himself, his power, and his image. He will stop at nothing to gobble up as much as he can which is why we muat be prepared to stop him by any means necessary. In the words of one of our greatest Presidents, “Speak softly, but carry a big stick”
It hasn’t worked in half a century. Protest had a greater effect before the global village. But now we have a better understanding of numbers making a show of force almost useless. We have shown up 700,000,000 for causes with practically no effect. It is a new world and it’s time to let go. We need to adapt yet there is an old guard holding us all back. It’s about spreading a message, it’s about beliefs and ideas and network and power. None of that can be achieved with protests. I would bet good money that behind many of these modern protests is actually the opposition. It is such a waste of time and effort and there is no argument in recent times that can show other wise.
You’re whole argument is detailing the internet when you actually read between the lines.
We should be choosing lower effort and maximizing for effect. Protests are high effort low effect. Online culture jamming is low effort, high effect. It is logic to anyone who thinks about this honestly
Half a century? Guess the Arab spring and the Euromaidan don’t count (just examples off the top of my head)
The commenter you replied to, basically described basic human-ing for you, and why it works and has always worked, in the past.
Your rebuttal is focused on…the Internet as an object of stagnant sociocultural jamming, is that right? I think that was the gist.
I won’t engage that directly at the moment, as it could just as easily be insight with poor communication skills behind it, as it could be a strange conspiracy theory, as it could be propaganda meant to deflate and discourage.
All equally plausible places to come from, because you keep repeating the same bits and not going deeper.
What is a low effort-high effect action you believe we should be taking?
On the same token, if your tactics to achieve a strategy which you’ve yet to share are sound…what are high effort and low effect actions we can force the opposition into making?
In the original comment they described having to drive hours to get to a protest. Does that sound like high effort to you.
Low effort is being able to sit at a desk compared to driving 3 hrs.
High effort is trying to rally millions into the street to face off against authority that has already solved protesting
It’s true that protesting by absenting yourself from the corrupt mainstream kinds turns what could be a fuck-you counterculture moment into a fuck-you-im-leaving subculture…
It’s just so gross out there lol. If anyone can stomach it while also not being co-opted though that’s cool and I support it.
I do think protests have their place though, but it’s like a cookout at the park type thing almost. You meet irl, you network, you vibe check; then you go on to do your other actions.
If some people just want to show up to vibe out and maybe put some radical slaps up that’s cool too. Probably good to have more normal types in attendance to be a shield for more radical elements.
It’s a long line of ‘you should just protest/vote harder’ countries, unfortunately
It’s a state election, in a relatively small state, it’s bad, but it’s not the end of democracy in Germany just yet. There are two more state elections in two weeks, AfD is predicted to be strongest in one of those states (MV) too, but not nearly as bad, as there is still a possibility for a stable government there. I’m not too worried about the other election in Berlin.
MAGA started as a small section of the republican party known as the tea party. They were thought of as an annoying but small group that was likely to fade on its own. People here thought the small wins weren’t important either and here we are. Once that shit catches on it spreads like a wildfire.
Eh, we’ve kinda seen the opposite in the Netherlands. Far-right party got in right-wing coalition, things obviously failed to work out for them as they were completely dysfunctional, and they were punished in the next election. In countries without FPTP it’s much harder for these kinds of parties to get in control.
Yeah the last years I always thought it is just a matter of time until far right gets majorities in Germany/all over Europe as well.
Greetings from germany
Welcome to the Assholocene.
…so BadEmpanada WAS right! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-H5m_BeJoQA&pp=ygUiIGJhZCBlbXBhbmFkYSBhbWVyaWNhbnMgZG9tdCBmaWdodA%3D%3D