The Left Pole: If You're Not With Us You're a Nazi

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The main points made by the gentleman in the below (German) video are that the incredibly expensive and destructive Energiewende does zilch to attain its purported end: stopping putative global warming. Also, expanding (by political fiat) the use of electric cars will only increase CO2 emissions, thus running counter to the hoped-for effect — yet another green absurdity.

I find this gentleman from the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, alternative for Germany) arrogant, which is not an unusual attitude among German politicians of any political colour. What matters is that he is spot on with his factual claims, and that, due to courageous outsiders like him, Germany begins to learn the facts of the Energiewende and other large developments affecting society and that a genuine debate on the issues is beginning to develop after more than 10 years of one-sided propaganda.

The Left Pole, however, ever eager to curtail freedom of speech, feels entitled to call partisans of the AfD NAZIS. 

If the allegation could be substantiated it would be easy to consign partisans of AfD to the prisons of this country. 

Nevertheless, the Left Pole copiously slanders a legal political party that has received the support of around 15 % of the electorate.  

Used to blunting human reason and exercising emotional control over the political consumer, the regressive left is driven to evoke stereotypes that are strongly charged with emotive power, trying to suffocate and ostracise those that think differently by wrapping the strongest cultural taboos — like Nazism — around them. It's a substitute for debate. It's just another instance of their thuggish war on freedom of speech. One wonders whose behaviour is reminiscent of the Nazi movement.

The highly problematic, arbitrary "hate speech" laws of the country could easily be applied against the Left Pole calling the AfD a Nazi crowd. They aren't because it is only political preponderance that can decide who is to be terrorised by these "laws". Fortunately, they seem not to be invoked much as yet. One more reason to welcome the AfD, whose visibility in the parliament makes it harder for the established bullies to pick on hapless whipping boys.

Yet, Bill Mitchell in Australia writes: 

And … just as an animal that quacks like a duck is a duck, the AfD are nazis.

(1) The fact that Germany has been without an opposition for a long time and (2) the attendant congestion of egregious maldevelopments impelled or not addressed  by parliament and the government have created pent-up demand for a political force that would bring these urgent issues finally to the fore. 

This force is the AfD, some of whose key players I have been able to meet: mostly German professors — people like my mother and my dad, who used to represent the political centre in Germany 40 years ago. 

I have no evidence whatsoever that this party pursues policies even remotely reminiscent of the Nazi movement. Had there been any such evidence, the party could not have been admitted to participate in the national elections. If however, for instance, calls for an orderly immigration policy in tune with international and national law are per se considered signs of Nazism, then AfD is a Nazi party, though not in an historically accurate but in a new, a Left Pole, sense of the word: if they do not concur with us, they are Nazis. Again this is in sync with the Left Pole's desire to criminalise opinions other than their own.

There is a (violent, Nazi-leaning) right wing scene in Germany, as everywhere, especially in the Eastern federal states, and it is impossible for the AfD to preclude that problematic right wingers vote for this party or advertise their support for it — plus, of course, even otherwise genuinely vicious right wingers may have reasonable complaints that are addressed only by the AfD. 

This is then used to brand AfD as a Nazi party. Unfortunately, such smears are inevitable when a new party is beginning to turn out to be a force to reckon with. The same thing happened to the Greens when they put in an appearance in German politics in the late 1970s / early 1980s.

I am glad that pluralism is reawakening in Germany, opening the pen of uniformity into which the political consumers have been herded in the last 20 years only to swallow, of course, the most harmful changes that a uniformly compliant people is bound to suffer. The AfD has the Energiewende and the equally calamitous EU in their sights — fundamental issues scandalously unaccompanied by any opposition in the past —, and I hope they will push for a restrengthening of national democracy and a freedom-respecting social democratic state willing to support the interests of the bulk of the ordinary working people.