POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*
(This article is pretty alarming. It seems that Germany is dealing with
a much larger threat than in the USA, where SPLC and antifa exaggerate
the situation. It states that much of the worst violence is taking place
in the former East German republic, something that supposedly is a
function of people retaining the authoritarianism of the Stalinist
system. I have a feeling that the anti-immigrant violence is a function
much more of the region's economic difficulties than anything else.)
NY Times, Feb. 22, 2020
‘Politics of Hate’ Takes a Toll in Germany Well Beyond Immigrants
By Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy
COLOGNE, Germany — The last time Henriette Reker ran for mayor, she was
nearly killed.
Ms. Reker was handing out flowers to voters at a bustling market in
Cologne in 2015, when a man took a rose with one hand and rammed a
kitchen knife into her throat with the other. He wanted to punish her
for her pro-refugee stance.
Five years later, Ms. Reker is running again. But she is an exception.
Since she recovered from a coma to find herself elected, far-right death
threats have become an everyday reality, not just for her but for an
increasing number of local officials across Germany.
The acrimony is felt in town halls and village streets, where mayors
now find themselves the targets of threats and intimidation. The effect
has been chilling.
Some have stopped speaking out. Many have quit, tried to arm themselves
or taken on police protection. The risks have mounted to such an extent
that some German towns are unable to field candidates for leadership at all.
“Our democracy is under attack at the grass-roots level,” Ms. Reker said
in a recent interview in Cologne’s City Hall. “This is the foundation of
our democracy, and it is vulnerable.”
The trend, the local officials and analysts say, reflects a worrying
breakdown of civility and political discourse in an increasingly
polarized Germany, where the insidious influence of an angry far right
is changing the rules of behavior.
Mayors, certainly, have not been the only ones to suffer as Germany’s
political and social fabric has strained. The shootings this week in the
western town of Hanau, near Frankfurt, that left 11 people dead were
just the latest attacks aimed at ethnic minorities.
Germans who openly support immigration have increasingly been targeted,
too. Given the decentralized nature of Germany’s political system, local
officials like mayors may be the most important among them. Attacks
against them take on outsize significance.
Over the last year, there were 1,240 politically motivated attacks on
politicians and elected officials in Germany, according to preliminary
figures released this year by the federal police.
A study conducted by the German Association for Cities and
Municipalities showed that 40 percent of the country’s city governments
had to contend with stalking, harassment or threats. Of the 11,000
mayors in the country, at least 1,500 reported concrete threats.
And people have died. In June, Walter Lübcke, a regional official, was
killed on his front porch by a known extremist, the first far-right
assassination of a German politician since World War II.
Supporters of far-right ideology were responsible for more than a third
of the reported episodes, nearly twice as many as were committed by
supporters of the extreme left, the government said.
But nearly half of all politically motivated attacks could not be
attributed to any specific group, reflecting what experts said showed
the erosion of civil norms.
Experts and local officials who have been affected say the violence
started when the 2008 economic crisis began to bite. But it took on new
dimensions in 2015, after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders to
more than one million asylum-seekers, most of them Muslim and many
fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Andreas Zick, the director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary
Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, has
been tracking the mood of German society for decades.
He said he first noticed groups of people calling themselves “concerned
citizens” who were critical of politicians emerge more than a decade ago.
One of their concerns has now grown into a concerted campaign of hate
against local politicians and representatives, he said, driven by
populist forces such as the far-right Alternative for Germany, a party
known by its German initials, AfD.
“The populists have declared the ‘elites’ as their enemy, and now we are
seeing the rise of this politics of hate which has infected the center
of
