Roger Boyd
Feb 11, 2025
Corriere Della Serra (Weidel and her Nazi military judge grandfather)
From the very start Hitler was financially supported and groomed by elements of the German establishment. As that establishment’s hold on the German people was challenged by the Great Depression they decided to move from liberalism (control the population through a hegemonic culture and false consciousness) to fascism. Hitler’s Nazi Party was very fully funded by German big business, but its vote share fell in the November 1932 election (from 37.3% in the July 1932 election to 33.1%). So the German establishment quickly installed him as the Chancellor of Germany (January 30th 1933). With this new power he utilized the state and the SA to fix the 1933 elections in his favour. Hitler was always a creation of the German oligarchs for the benefit of the German oligarchs.
Once in power Hitler rapidly moved to crush the SA, which was the arm of the Nazi Party most committed to real social change to benefit the working people. He then also rounded up the communists (hence the first line of the famous Niemoller poem “first they came for the communists”), banned independent trades unions, privatized state enterprizes, and removed many labour regulations - all to serve the German oligarchy. The latter lost control a little as Hitler went to war but were more than happy to make endless profits off the dispossession of Jewish properties, the looting of the occupied territories, the mass use of slave labour, and the colossally profitable armaments spending. After WW2 most of these war criminals got off scot free and in many cases prospered in post-WW2 Germany, like the Nazi family that now controls BMW.
The AfD was founded by a group of neoliberal professors (Lucke, Ederer, Homburg, Starbatty) who wanted to “gut the state, minimize the tax burden and overhaul the social market economy according to libertarian ideas” while being socially conservative and nationalist. This article provides the details of how the AfD is “neoliberal to the core”. The party really took off with the German refugee crisis, benefitting from the growing anti-immigrant wave. Much of the new membership was more traditionally right wing, not neoliberal, and a multi-year fight within the party resulted; with some members being expelled from the party. The more traditional right-wing members can be seen as the equivalent of the Nazi SA, hating “the bosses” as much as the immigrants. From early on the Swiss-based German billionaire August von Finck financially supported the AfD; mirroring the early financial support given to the Nazis by Fritz Thyssen, I. G. Farben and Krupp. He also funded a newspaper The Deutschland Kurier that both editorially supports the AfD and provides services to the party. Finck and other rich donors to the AfD can be seen as political venture capitalists, who fund and keep alive political parties which may be useful to them in the future. Finck’s father was a leading and influential banker during both the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Reich, helped fund the Nazi Party during the 1930s, and was part owner of Merck, Finck & Co. which served as Hitler’s personal bank.
The two groupings within the AfD have managed to come together and paper over their differences to achieve electoral success. The party is co-headed by Tino Chrupella and Alice Weidel, with the latter being put forward for the position of German Chancellor in the current election campaign. She is the perfect candidate to keep the AfD on the extremist neoliberal path. Die Linke, the socialist party that should have thrived in an East Germany utterly exploited by the West German oligarchs destroyed itself through the usual infiltration of “critical theory” and identity politics (as so many left wing parties have in the West) that were nurtured by the Western security states to force out actual real socialism during the Cold War. As usually happens when the left alternative is extinguished, the working people turned to the right, the AfD.
Weidel is the leader that the oligarchy has selected. She is a fully paid up member of the neoliberal extremists, a member of the Frederick Hayeck Society since 2016. Her employment history includes Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China and Allianz Global Investors (the latter founded by Finck’s father); hardly that of someone fighting for the working people. Her PhD thesis advisor was Peter Oberender, a neoliberal economist and founder of the predecessor party to the AfD, Wahlalternative 2013. She is his political protege. Her first political campaign was found to be illegally funded by Finck, the AfD ended up having to pay a big fine but Weidel went unpunished. She is also very usefully fluent in Mandarin, something that will be helpful if the German oligarchy takes a more nationalist stance and needs to mend bridges with China. No more of the Baerbock idiocy. Weidel is also a woman and a lesbian, fitting the bill to widen the appeal of a fascist leader.
Her Wikipedia entry interestingly does not follow the usual norm of naming both parents, perhaps because that may lead us to her grandfather who was a Nazi military judge directly appointed by Hitler. No wonder she calls for an end to what her party defines as a “cult of shame” over the Nazi atrocities. Or tries to label Hitler as a socialist and communist during an interview with Elon Musk (starts at the 22 second mark).
Weidel is far too intelligent and well educated to not know that such statements are utter lies; pure propaganda. Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents moved from Canada to South Africa because they preferred the apartheid system. It is also interesting that oligarch Trump backer Peter Thiel was born in Germany, and his father’s doings during the Nazi era are utterly obfuscated. Thiel lived with his family in South Africa for a few years during his childhood. Now both Thiel and Musk are very much supporters of Weidel. Below is Musk’s full interview with Weidel, where she shows herself to be an arch propagandist in mixing facts with half truths, manipulations, and absolute lies while leaving out important facts that are problematic for her narrative.
The AfD will most probably not win a place in the next German government, which will most probably be a CDS/CDU one lead by the oligarch vassal tool Merz. A recent poll shows the CDS/CDU at 29%, the AfD at 23%, and the SPD at 15%, which once the parties that did not gain at least 5% of the vote have been removed may just allow for a CDS/CDU-SPD ruling coalition. Otherwise the Green Party polling at 13% would have to be added to the anti-AfD coalition. The truly left wing BSW hovering just above the 5% cutoff and the FDP and Die Linke on or below it. As with other right-wing parties, the polls may understate the support for the AfD due to reticence among those surveyed to say that they will be voting for such a party.
Like the Nazis, the AfD is a longer term investment initiative, being held back for use in case the current dominant parties start to be fully rejected by the populace. Then, as in 1932 the fascist alternative can be placed in power by the German establishment. As it is no longer acceptable to use the Jewish community as the official Other it will now be the turn of the Arabs/Moslems. As the German economy continues to decline the probable CDS/CDU-SPD coalition will begin to “own” the decline and fall in popularity. In parallel Ms. Weidel will be normalized by the German establishment so that the AfD can be accepted into a ruling coalition. She has already established her dominance in the AfD, being put forward as the proposed AfD Chancellor in the February elections.
Weidel is just like Meloni in Italy, the leader of a fascist party that fully serves the oligarchs. Also a parallel of Starmer, who was used to fully co-opt the British Labour Party into serving the oligarchy. In the UK the oligarchs are already working on their next backup candidate, the utterly fascist oligarch tool Farage. She is also like the oligarch-serving Freeland in Canada, who was raised at the feet of her Nazi-serving fascist grandfather. In many ways Weidel is also a “sane” and calm version of the fake populist Milei in Argentina. National oligarchies can produce an endless procession of new “protest” political alternatives that will in reality keep all state policies that serve the oligarchs while removing state support and protections for the majority. Just like Trump, the business disaster who is fully bought and paid for by real billionaires. A man so rich he desperately plays every cheap money-raising trick in the book, the latest being his and his wife’s shitcoins. We see his financial assets, but his financial liabilities remain extremely opaque.
In the last great crisis of Western capitalism, the 1930s, the oligarchs had a choice between fascism and some other form of capitalism. In the US a compromise with the working people was chosen given that it could be aligned with the high profits of Fordism; a compromise that the oligarchs set about undermining nearly immediately. Fascism had actually been used, from 1917 to 1921, to force an unwilling US population into WW1 and to destroy the core of the working class movements (e.g. “The Wobblies”) under the leadership of the racist bigot President Wilson. In Britain the stopgap of Bonapartism was utilized with a “national” government papering over the cracks but not resolving anything. In France there was the chaos of the dying embers of the French Third Republic, resolved with the German invasion and the fascist Vichy regime followed by the fascist de Gaulle. In Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Japan fascism was chosen. In the post-war period many of the Western “democracies” had extremely fascist elements, how else could the 1950s McCarthyism and security services widespread spying and involvement in politics be typified. Or the Italian post-war era, culminating in the Strategy of Tension. Or the reams of Nazi criminals that took senior positions in the governments of both Germany and Austria? Or the fascist South American governments, fully backed by the US, that terrorized their own populations into subjugation?
Fascism never went away because it is a tool of capitalist oligarchy always kept in reserve in case “liberalism” fails to control the population with its more subtle methods. As Gramsci so well identified, the utilization of a hegemonic culture to control the population does not mean that the state and oligarch weapons of coercion and violence are put away. They are always kept available for use, and many times used in specific instances requiring a “heavier hand”.
It is sad that so many of the “alternative” commentators mistake the Trumps, the Melonis, the Farages, the Weidels for agents of real change. But that is the genius of the oligarchy, it excels at co-option, corruption and misdirection to keep the eyes of the working majority away from the greatest problem in society; themselves. And also to mislead the majority into serving the interests of the small oligarch minority.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/alice- ... garch-tool
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Germany and the Antifascist Firewall That Never Was
Posted by Internationalist 360° on February 7, 2025
Timo Al-Farooq
Germany’s so-called antifascist “firewall” against the far-right has collapsed, but mainstream parties have in fact long been complicit in militarism, anti-refugee policies, and unconditional support for “Israel”—all hallmarks of modern fascism.
There is a word that has been on everyone’s lips in recent days and weeks in Germany: “Brandmauer.” Meaning firewall, it refers to the consensus among the country’s mainstream political parties that forbids any cooperation with far-right parties.
That non-codified agreement was thrown overboard recently when the opposition centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), poised to win the upcoming snap federal elections on 23 February, proposed an anti-immigrant parliamentary motion that passed with support from the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Though the draft law was ultimately voted down by the Bundestag on 31 January, CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s decision to burn down the antifascist firewall without batting an eye bodes ill for what is to come after the elections.
With the CDU currently polling at 30% and the AfD at 22%, this would give both parties a comfortable majority to form a coalition government under a Chancellor Merz between what many from the left see as two parties with eerily aligning ideologies when it comes to migration.
While Merz continues to pay lip service to the intactness of the anti-AfD firewall, promising delegates at his party’s congress last Monday that there would be “no cooperation” and “no minority government” with the AfD, Merz’s unprecedented move to join forces with a party that Germany’s Verfassungsschutz intelligence agency has classified as “presumably right-wing extremist” can only be seen as a dry run meant to desensitise voters to the prospect of what could well be post-WW2 Germany’s first federal government with far right participation.
The hypocrisy of anti-AfD protests
Following the CDU’s historic paradigm shift towards further normalising the AfD by soliciting its support in parliament, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Germany.
Under the banner “Aufstand der Anständigen” (Uprising of the decent), 250,000 people, according to the organisers, descended upon Berlin’s government district on 2 February.
While mainstream German media is celebrating these numbers as proof positive of the broader electorate’s unwavering democratic and antiracist convictions, these protests are highly controversial because they selectively blame the opposition CDU and AfD for reactionary policies the governing centre-left coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP) has been implementing for years.
The firewall against the AfD might have crumbled, but it was never very sturdy to begin with due to one key engineering flaw: mainstream parties’ complicity in the unstoppable rise of the far right.
Many of those scandalised by Merz’s transgression fail to see the hypocrisy of protesting against the future possibility of fascism from the right, but remaining markedly silent on the present fascist re-modelling of the German state spearheaded by the liberal elites in power.
Germany’s unfettered militarism in the wake of the Ukraine war, its unapologetic material and moral support for “Israel’s” fifteen-month-long genocide in Gaza (which has now shape-shifted into the post-ceasefire ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West Bank), and accompanying crackdowns on Palestine solidarity, as well as the passing of draconian anti-refugee laws, are all policies vigorously pursued by so-called liberals and progressives.
Why get riled up about Merz’s anti-immigrant overtures when Chancellor Olaf Scholz proudly proclaimed in 2023 to “deport on a grand scale” and his Green party Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock described the European Union’s controversial 2024 migration reform, which allows for asylum-seekers who are waiting for their applications to be approved, to be held in detention centres at the EU’s external borders for up to 12 weeks as a testament to “humanity and order?”
Antiracist, yet pro-Zionist
A prime example of liberal Germany’s selective outrage is the utter lack of indignation at an anti- democratic resolution passed on the same day the AfD-supported CDU motion to toughen migration policy which shocked German complacency into action. Entitled “Anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel at schools and universities”, it is an unprecedented state-sponsored attack on the constitutionally enshrined autonomy of universities and academic freedom in the service of “Israel”.
Albeit non-binding, the resolution calls for, among other things, the expulsion of students who participate in activities that promote what Germany’s Zionist consensus has termed “Israel-related antisemitism”, a designation based on the infamous IHRA working definition of antisemitism which views any criticism of “Israel” as inherently anti-Jewish. These activities could include anything from calling for the boycott of “Israel” to protesting against its violent settler colonialism.
Yet antidemocratic developments like this latest legislative expression of anti-Palestinian racism made under the guise of fighting Jew-hatred (the second in three months) have failed to inform the antiracist motivation of so-called decent citizens who are taking to the streets in their hundreds of thousands against the spectre of right-wing authoritarianism embodied by an AfD in government.
Nor has Germany’s centre-left coalition government’s steadfast support for the most fascist Israeli government in the Zionist entity’s history while it conducted the world’s first live-streamed genocide, described by Palestinian American legal scholar Noura Erakat in an X post as the “cruelest phase” of a 76-year-long Nakba, led to any kind of self-critical reflection among these so-called antifascist protesters, many of whom are Social Democratic and Green party loyalists.
On the contrary: The Greens boasted a record number of 5000 new membership applications in five days following Merz’s political sacrilege of collaborating with the AfD.
As the Europe Palestine Network, an Instagram account with 120,000 followers, put it candidly in a comment on the mass protest in Berlin, “We wish all these people stood up against the genocide and supported Palestine too. They are against AfD and not necessarily against Israel and the crimes it commits in Gaza.”
Germany’s much lauded “Brandmauer”: the antifascist firewall that never was.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/ ... never-was/
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Europe pays the price for its own mistakes
Lucas Leiroz
February 8, 2025
The allies supported the United States in promoting the American slogan of the “rules-based order.” Now they are enjoying the consequences.
Since 1991, the collective West has actively promoted the concept of a “rules-based world order.” However, from the beginning, this concept has served mainly as a justification for unilaterally imposing U.S. interests on other countries, ignoring legitimate international treaties and conventions. Europe, which was complicit in this abrupt change in international law, now appears to be reaping the bitter fruits of its own choices.
The idea of a “rules-based order” has always been malleable, molded to suit U.S. interests. What has become clear, however, is that European allies—as well as some puppet states in the “Global South” itself—have ended up ceding their sovereignty to Washington in the name of an alliance that, unsurprisingly, has weakened them politically. Greenland is an emblematic example of this new geopolitical reality. The island, which belongs to Denmark, was the target of an explicit attempt to buy it by Donald Trump during his previous presidency. Now, in his new term, Trump seems even more determined to “take” Greenland, not even ruling out the use of military force.
As the United States seeks to expand its presence in the Arctic, seeking control of sea routes and natural resources, European allies such as France find themselves in an difficult position, having to publicly defend Danish sovereignty. Despite European resistance, Washington continues to exert pressure. The root of the matter is not the fate of Greenland itself, but the fact that, by supporting the United States, Europeans have become hostages to the American agenda, losing the means to exercise their sovereignty and challenge Washington’s strategic interests.
The inability of European allies to effectively resist U.S. interests in the Arctic illustrates how the “rules-based order” has become a tool of control rather than a globally equitable legal system. The U.S. not only dictates the rules, but also imposes its will directly on its own allies, as demonstrated in disputes over strategic territories such as Greenland itself. While Europeans argue about borders and sovereignty, the U.S. makes the game in its favor, ignoring international agreements and the will of other states – even supposed “allies.”
American foreign policy, especially under the influence of the Trump doctrine, is not limited to reducing the U.S. global presence, but also seeks to expand control over nearby geographic zones. Trump’s rhetoric about the annexation of territories such as Greenland is not a mere provocation, but a clear message about the dominance that Washington intends to maintain in the Americas and the Arctic, which are the portion of the world map that the U.S. keeps preserving in the midst of the process of multipolarization. The allies, although initially resistant, do not now seem to be able to effectively oppose American pressure, resulting in a scenario where U.S. geopolitical interests prevail over the sovereignty of European nations.
By supporting this “rules-based order,” which in practice serves only to consolidate American interests, European countries have contributed to the weakening of international law. The lack of a firm stance against Washington’s impositions has allowed the United States to consolidate a position of power, where the rules are adapted to suit its needs. Now, nations that previously supported U.S. initiatives find themselves in a situation of submission, with their foreign policy legitimacy being questioned. The direct consequence is the erosion of international law and the diminished ability of these countries to defend their interests on the global stage.
The most significant impact of this dynamic is the loss of sovereignty for U.S. allies, who over the years have allowed Washington to set the rules while burying the international law that was supposed to protect their borders and interests. In exchange for an alliance based on liberal ideology but not on justice, these nations now find themselves forced to follow Washington’s directives without the ability to challenge them, as evidenced by the disputes over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and other strategic territories.
In the end, it is possible to say that the world is witnessing a restructuring of international relations in which the “rules-based order” created to benefit the United States has resulted in friction among America’s own allies.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... -mistakes/
Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are looking for loopholes in international law to seize Russian ships.
Today, the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) officially left the BRELL energy ring, disconnecting from the energy systems of the Russian Federation and Belarus.
Russia has the will and resources to make NATO's dreams of turning the Baltic Sea into an "internal lake" of the alliance unrealistic, - Russian Ambassador to Finland Pavel Kuznetsov
