Labels, Lawfare and Censors
Desperate leaders resort to shady techniques to try to stay in power
In a world of mediocre leaders, governments are collapsing everywhere. The United States has a fixed schedule for elections. Most countries have a maximum time between elections but allow for a "no-confidence" vote to force a new election if the government is doing poorly. The number of elections this year shows it's been a horrible year.
The errors and problems have tended in the same direction, and the voters want to move away from the status quo. Therefore, the old guard has some tricks they have been using to try to block that. They tried it in our election, but it didn't work. They are still trying it in Canada and Europe.
First, they try labeling. There is a German political party called (in English) the Far-Right Alternative for Germany. We are told it is the successor to the Nazis and a threat to everything good in the world. What do they think they are? They call themselves Alternative für Deutschland (AFD). "Far-right" is a disparaging adjective added by those who want the status quo.
Let's understand Germany's current situation. It was an industrial powerhouse with cheap energy, including gas from Russia, supporting its petrochemical and auto industries. Nuclear power plants provided carbon-free power 24/7. It had a reasonably safe and homogeneous population.
Angela Merkel began to change that. Her open-border policy led to overwhelming migration and massive social tensions. As one newspaper later described it:
On New Year's Eve 2015, hundreds of women were mobbed and sexually assaulted [by immigrants] during celebrations in the western German city of Cologne. German politics and society were forever changed.
Parliamentary majorities are built with a combination of parties. The German Greens somehow always made themselves part of the majority. Their condition for joining was the end of nuclear power and more wind and solar. They eventually got it. The famous story is that Germany built more windmills and solar panels in one year and got less energy. Mother Nature made it a calm, cloudy year.
Ukraine-Russia made everything worse. The Nord Stream pipelines are a joint German Russian venture. The United States opposed it because we wanted to supply Europe with our gas. When the Russian-Ukraine battles started, sanctions were imposed on Russia, and the pipeline was destroyed. Energy costs in Germany exploded as much as tenfold. The public felt this directly in terms of heating and fuel.
There was a more damaging effect. The Germans are hard-working and excellent designers who benefitted immensely from low-cost energy. Any factory or process uses energy, and its cost is a significant factor in the cost of the product. When energy costs went up ten-fold, products became non-competitive. That's what has happened to Germany.
Volkswagen is planning to close three plants. Other car companies are cutting back or closing plants. Other industries are moving production overseas.
Given all this, you can understand why the German public might look for leaders who do things differently or alternately. A party that wants nuclear power and Russian gas might reduce some of their problems. A party that stops sending money or weapons to Ukraine and stops listening to Brussels about immigration might have more resources for its people.
The current government recently collapsed, forcing an election on February 23. The old guard is ready to try lawfare. German law has a provision forbidding Nazi-style parties. Because they keep labeling the AFD "far-right," they've convinced themselves that restricting immigration is equivalent to genocide and gives them the legal authority to ban the AFD. One can only imagine the public reaction to any attempt to outlaw all attempts to limit immigration.
In Romania, a court canceled an election based on an intelligence report of Russian interference when it looked like a pro-Russian candidate might win. In Germany, all the other parties indicated they would refuse to form a coalition with the AFD to form a government. European Union officials have openly stated that they will overrule any election in Germany that yields a result they don't like.
Censorship is rearing its nasty head all over Europe and countries in the Anglosphere where the Free Speech tradition started. Twentieth-century dystopian novels like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 assumed dictatorships would restrict reading and speech so the public could not consider inappropriate ideas.
The late Roger Scruton coined the term oikophobia to describe the hatred of "our betters" toward the general public, which must suffer to meet higher goals.
The policies of the Greens and NATO are acceptable even though they are destroying the economies of Europe, Canada, and the USA. Sanctions, Net Zero, and reputed renewable energy are irrefutable and cannot be debated. Carbon-free nuclear power is unacceptable. Unlimited immigration is required because it is a penance for past sins. These ideas are expressed openly.
Elon Musk is taking on this censorship in Britain and Europe. The EU is threatening to block his X platform because he had a long interval with Alice Weidel, a leader of the AFD party. How dare he treat it as a serious party and allow people to hear what the AFD believes! What do they think?
AFD dares to believe that governments should care for the safety and interests of their people. That makes them nationalist fanatics in today's upside-down world.
Alice Weidel's speech to the Bundestag is available on YouTube. The AFD thinks renewable energy, unavailable at night or on cloudy, windless days, is absurd. They don't see the point in giving more money to a pointless cause in Ukraine and continuing sanctions that harm Germany and eastern European countries at least as much as they hurt Russia. They also harbor dangerous thoughts about the EU, the Euro, and even NATO.
Thoughts like this are too extreme to be considered. I don't know if they are far-right. They are dangerous because they put people first and elite agendas last.