http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/images/refugees_welcome.jpgToday we are also bedeviled by Know-Nothings -- in many countries. We hear similar views in London and Paris, in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, in Munich and Berlin. And we hear of results worse than in 1855 in Maryland or Massachusetts: of desperate misery in the "Jungle" of Calais or at the Italian-French border, of broken windows and flaming roofs in refugee hostels in more and more German towns. Such attacks, vicious graffiti, insulting hog carcasses, increasingly, Molotov cocktails as well, numbered 202 in Germany alone in the first half of 2015, already surpassing the number in 2014. . . . Among such German Know-Nothings are still the PEGIDA demonstrators with their "anti-Islamic" shouts and banners. Nationally more organized are those in the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, which recently ousted its moderately far-right leader and moved even further to the racist right; the split cut its poll numbers to 3-4 %, which would at least keep it out of the Bundestag. The older National Democratic Party (NPD), no longer seated in Saxony's legislature but very present in its main districts, has now been augmented by a newer group called the Third Way, a mix of violence-prone neo-Nazis, which has spread from Bavaria to the eastern Brandenburg -- and of course Saxony. Though small in number, they are clever in stirring fear and resentment, especially when those responsible for bringing in refugees fail to discuss and explain the move to local residents. Freital near Dresden, in GDR days a flourishing steel town, has been plagued for weeks by noisily menacing rallies led by such right-wing forces. The police hold them back from the hotel assigned to asylum seekers, but just barely; at a public meeting those supporting the refugees were booed and denied the word, including Saxony's Interior Minister, who as mayor in another town once took a strong stand on the issue, but more recently, like his boss at the helm in Saxony, often seems nearly tongue-tied. Freital's mayor, on the other hand, was anything but tongue-tied during his election campaign when he demanded "sanctions against the swarming, violent asylum-seekers . . . adventurers coming to Germany to live a life of ease at the cost of the community." All three politicians are from the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Angela Merkel. One city councilor, a leader of the Linke (Left) party who took a courageous stand for the refugees, awoke one night when his car exploded and burnt. Threats mailed to him had been dismissed by the police. In Meissen, to the north of Dresden, threats to a building being repaired for use by the new arrivals were similarly dismissed. It was also wrecked by fire. German politics are again split. With a low birthrate and sinking population, new people are needed by many corporations, to whom national background is of little importance. Upright democratic words come easily to the tongue tips of politicians -- if and when they want them. But above all the demands of working people must be contained, and how better than, despite all doubletalk, to let them be misled into fighting not the big firms but those "greedy foreigners" -- whether Greeks in Athens or Syrians in Dortmund? New laws now demonstrate this bipolarity; refugees who have lived here four to six years, if they speak German and have jobs, have better chances to remain, which is humane. But for those refugees still outside the borders it will be tougher. Perhaps not for all of them. Qualified engineers, doctors, and other desirable professionals will now have better chances, for they are needed. The right-wing Bavarian leader Horst Seehofer had a new plan, now being copied elsewhere. Sort out those from the "East Balkans" with little hopes of acceptance, keep the latter in gyms or tents and throw them out speedily. Only a few on the Left or some Greens have noted the possible resemblance of such "Gypsy camps" with those of the Nazis before the trains brought the Roma to Auschwitz. No, it's not the same. But too few realize that the wars in Aleppo, Baghdad, and Kabul, which force so many to risk their lives in leaky death traps, were caused or armed by the major western powers, or that the poverty sending Africans along the same route derives from colossal, lasting exploitation, with cheap exports of "northern" goods destroying the livelihoods of small farmers, tailors, and other craftsmen, forcing them into hopeless mega slums and from there across the deserts to Libya, where warplanes of the great powers created the chaos conducive to today's racketeering smugglers.

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