this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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If they really want to deport foreigners they should start with the old-fashioned antisemites that mingle in those protests.
that is part of their supposed reasoning. the four are accused of chanting antisemitic things, but they dont tell u what has allegedly been chanted.
either way, deporting EU citizens who havent been committed of any crimes is very legally dubious.
deportations in general if u ask me, are morally dubious.
It's not hard to make a guess given the context
we can guess, yes. but the fact that the claim has not been backed by any criminal proceedings, and they dont even want to say what exactly theyre accused of chanting, is a ridiculous basis for deportation if u ask me.
TBF: as the article states, under German law it is not. Whether that is a good idea can surely be debated, but it is legal.
I seem to remember that most of the actions of the Nazis once they got into power were also legal.
Maybe, just maybe, people should have a standard of right and wrong which does not delegate that definition to "legality", especially people in Germany.
Why Germany especially? So far, every state of injustice declared legal whatever they wanted to do, be it Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin,.. or even the US, where you once could legally own people.
And of course there is always room for discussion whether things that are legal should be legal. Or illegal. But the chances of that having an effect on those four people here are rather slim.
I was born in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship.
Not long after, there was a Revolution, the Fascist Regime was overthrown and the country became Democratic.
Still now, half a century later, people in my country of birth remain quite sensitive and easilly alarmed by practices of those in power which are similar to the kind of things that those in power in the Fascist regime would do (for example, things like civil society surveillance).
I expect exactly the same from Germans, maybe just less of it since their Fascist days have been gone for longer and (judging by my own country), people's alertness to and rejection of things "like what they used to do before" seems to fall the further away from the dictatorship days we are.
Or are you telling me that Germans are special and different from other people and hence it's wrong to expect them to have a higher tendency than those who never had Fascism to reject practices by those in power now which are similar to those of their very own past Fascist dictatorship?!
PS: That said, maybe a people who has freed itself from Fascism is significantly more sensitive to anything that bares even just a passing ressemblance to what the Fascists use to do, than a people whose Fascism was overthrown by others, in which case I was wrong in expecting Germans to have a natural rejection of Fascist practices. That being so, it would also explain just how easilly the German power elites keep on bit by bit, doing more and more things like they did in the "old days" and most of the population meekly accepts it or even defends and aplauds it.
That's something we also thought for a long time, that we are kind of bulletproof to something like this ever happening again.
The problem/main difference to your country: yes, it's been longer ago, but also, we had reunification, where two very different places became one and defacto a large population living in a socialist dictatorship for decades had to integrate into fully-running country of the former 'class enemy'. This rift still isn't fully closed and it is something you won't find in most other countries. This lead to a smaller degree of cohesion and a larger portion of people having difficulties to identify with our national architecture.
Furthermore, the people nowadays are way more influenced by the events of the German Partition and its aftermath than the Third Reich. And even there, those that themselves experienced mass surveillance and living in a state of injustice now seem to have no problems expanding surveillance and again oppressing the enemies, as long as it's not them. In the end, people, irrespective of their nationality, can have a very short memory.
That makes sense.
I stand corrected.
from the article:
Sorry, I read your initial sentence as in 'deporting someone who hasn't been convicted of a crime'.
It's not under EU law. Freedom of movement for EU citizens is a legally binding treaty obligation.
The TFEU has a provision in section 45 that allows member states to limit this freedom, e.g. for security reasons. It will be up to a court to rule whether a sufficient reason was present in these cases, but a state can legally strip you of these rights.
There's no way calling for an end to a genocide (or even a war) is sufficient reason, and they likely know that. So it is, in fact, illegal.
Denying Israel it's existence can be a sufficient reason. But we both are merely guessing, since we all do not know what actually happened/was said.
No it's not what the hell? Or, well, if it then the EU is doomed because that's not how a democracy is supposed to function.
It is part of the German 'reason of State', as also mentioned in the article. Hence, denying Israel it's existence is a very very bad idea in Germany.
staatsräson, as the article also states, is not a meaningful legal category
That's what the courts will determine now, I guess.
And while Staatsräson itself might not be a meaningful legal category, chanting for the elimination of Israel's existence can already be punishable within the existing StGB, even without the currently discussed additions to it to explicitly punish calls for the elimination of nations.
what antisemites? deporting people is a Nazi tactic so it's ironic to label this "combatting antisemitism".
I'm not supporting illegal deportation, but I'm also not supporting true "I really just hate jews because they are jews"-antisemites that unfortunately feel right at home in valid protests against Israel's actions.
protests are public, those people are gonna show up no matter how progressive the protest.
most antisemites in Germany are pro-Israel, people that go at AfD marches to support their party's line of Zionism by all means necessary in order to bring about the rapture of Jewish people from the Holy Lands.
I don't understand, the rapture of the Jewish people by establishing a Zionist ethno state? I think it's much simpler: The original fascists were antisemites because Jews were the scapegoat that could mobilise the masses due to a hatred for Jews that has been cultivated for centuries in Europe, it was en vogue. The fascist(oid) populists today use Arabs/Muslims (not that the average AfD supporter knows the difference) and therefore show public support with a regime that already shows little mercy for those. And yeah, true neo nazis, islamists and whoever else hate Jews will show up for the protests, and if there really need to be deportations, they should be first.
the deportation of anyone, regardless if they're a political enemy or not, is a direct pipeline to normalizing fascism.
this is an article exemplifying how fascism always comes for trans people first and you're here talking bs about islamists. most terrorists in Germany are white Germans.
I haven't been clear. Yes, deportations are wrong (even though my heart really wants fascists out of the country), and yes, it's alarming that at least half of the victims are trans/queer.
i agree entirely with you. i think the only way for Germans to get rid of fascism is to start tackling their white supremacist culture.
That's true for all of Europe. But first, we'll need to get our shit together and fend off agitprop from Russia, China, and, in the future, the US.
I've lived all over Europe and once upon a time I naively expected that people in the country of Nazism would nowadays be the most sensitive to racist thinking and acting of all, and hence the least racist of all, but that's not at all my experience.
Germany and Germans justifying the racist practices of their own power elites and the fast slide back to authoritarian practices, with whataboutism and "legality" (as if most of the worst actions of the Nazis weren't things they first made sure to make legal) is, frankly, scary as fuck for any European who is not a far-right Muppet, not least because it shows the moral and ethical distance between mainstream German politics and the AfD is paper thin.
Most of Europe isn't supporting the mass murder of children by a nation because of the ethnicity said nation claims to represent and most of Europe hasn't made it legal to deport people who weren't tried and found guilty of something, and that Germany, of all nations, who did what they did almost a century ago and spent the time since telling us "Never again!" are back to the level of racism that knowingly sends wepons and ammo to a nation mass murdering chidren justifying that support with the ethnicity of the people of that nation, and is passing Fascist legislation to deport people without trial, is really making them stand out from the rest of Europe when it comes to Racism and Fascism.
Your peers in Europe on the Racist and Fascist scales are the likes of Hungary, not the Scandinavians or even the French.
Well the Holocaust really fucked up any hope for the entity that followed Nazi Germany to have a reasonable relationship with an entity that claims to be a Jewish state. Nevertheless there are alt right movements in almost all Euro nations that need to be dealt with.
I suspect the problem was that the attempt at making amends was framed in a way that kept the Racism alive and well (i.e. the duty of making amends was framed as being towards an entire ethnicity rather than being towards the actual people who were victims, their families and their descendants - so kept treating people as ethnics but a specific ethnic group is now "good ones" rather than "bad ones"). This both explains the repeated loud proclamations of "unwavering support for the Jewish People" and the complete and total lack of similar support for other etnicities targetted by the Nazis with the Holocaust, such as the Roma People (more commonly known as Gypsies).
That the making of amends was itself structured within a Racist thinking framework isn't exactly surprising given than the whole thing was done back in the 50, which was still very Racist by modern day standards, and that pretty much all of the Nazi "middle management" as well as the Nazi-supporting wealthy elites were kept in their places (it's easy to get old Fascists to loudly proclaim their disavowing of the last regime, but changing the actual way they look at their fellow human beings in the privacy of their minds is something much harder).
The surprising part (certainly it was hugelly surprising for me, who used to have a very good opinion of the country less than a decade ago) is that in its way to the XXI century Germany has not in fact evolved along with the rest of Europe away from a mental framework that sees ethnicity as more relevant than character.
Absolutelly, all Western nations have problems with the Far-Right and its favorite practices (Racism, Fascism, Might is Right, Nationalism and so on), to a less or greater level depending on the country, but the vast majority of countries in Europe had actually, before this period or moral and ethical regression started a decade ago, gone far further amongst the population in general in disassembling the ideological foundations of Racism and Authoritarinism supporting that kind of crap, than Germany.
The "making of amends", the historical processing of what the hell happened with honest effort, didn't happen in the 50's, it started in the 70's during and after the student protests. The processing of these crimes is an almost impossible task, its execution was and is far from perfect, its intended lessons apparantly start to wane, but I'll not slam the efforts done by so many people.
I also wonder if you ever visited Eastern Europe if you think the vast majority of countries in Europe have overcome "the ideological foundations of Racism".
edit: And btw. German Sinti and Roma, descendents of the victims you refer to, don't want to be referred to as "Gypsies".
True, I never lived in Eastern Europe, only in Northern, Western and Southern Europe.
Are you telling me that Eastern Europeans commonly support groups mass murdering children along racial lines if the ethnicity of the members of the group doing the mass murder is deemed more important than other ethnicities?
Because that's some pretty extreme Racism (as race-based discrimination goes, it's pretty hard to beat actually sending weapons to child mass murders and justifying it with one's "unwavering support" of their ethnicity), whilst the most extreme Racism I'm aware of in EE is in ex-Jugoslavia between mainly Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians which was also a Genocide but didn't leave tens of thousands of dead children, bombed out hospitals, a long list of murdered journalists and a list of babies murdered just in the first 6 months which is 17 pages long, not even close.
Even the stuff that happened following the break up of Jugoslavia did not get anywere as bad as what Germany supports in Gaza very overtly because of the ethnicity of the Genociders and I'm not aware of any present day EE nation like Germany supporting outright Genocide openly because of the ethnicity of the genociders (though from what I've heard there's a lot of Racism in Hungary, though I believe they fall short of supporting mass murdering of children if done by those of the "right" race).
In this Germany is almost in a class of its own (though not quite: it's there together with Brexiter Britain and Trump's America, hardly stellar company).
PS: Re-read how I named the Roma People, "Roma people" and how my use of the word "Gypsies" is very clearly framed as a clarification for those who do not know the proper name of that people. I expected that the way I wrote would make it pretty clear that the proper way to refere to them was "Roma people", but guess I was wrong in that.
No, I’m saying there are parts of Europe that are just as casually racist as East German hinterlands. I wouldn’t equate the government’s stance on the war to the general sentiments in the public. I think it’s just not that high of a priority for most people, kinda understandable considering all the shit that‘s going on, nationally and internationally. The October 7th attack was the first time for years that this war got extensive media coverage.
Oh, casual Racism is a plague all over the World and, worse, some of the countries which supposedly have gone beyond it, really just changed the lists of "good"/"deserving" races and "bad"/"undeserving" races and called the discriminatory behaviour anchored in those new lists "positive", as if treating people differently depending on their race is a good thing as long as it's only for certain races but a bad thing for others.
Racism is always a coin with two faces - there are always some who are presumed to, due to their ethnicity, be relatively better people and thus treated in a relatively better way, and others who due to their ethnicity are presumed to be relatively worst people and treated in a relatively worst way - and just because one goes around empasysing the "positive" side of treating some better due to their race doesn't make the thing any less Prejudiced, Discriminatory and unjust.
The boundary between Racism and not-Racism is not defined by which are the races for which you will treat individuals better and which for which you treat individuals worst, or even on the focusing on positive treatment for some races (the modern spin on Racism) rather than negative treatment for other races (the Fascist spin on Racism), it's defined by judging and treating or not people differently depending on their race.
To eliminate Racism you need to eliminate the way of thing thinking that is the foundation of Racism: that the character of people, their worth and the treatment they deserved depends on their ethnicity.
"Positive" Discrimination doesn't eliminate Racism, it just moves the unfair, Racist, treatment to favour different ethnicities - a different list of ubermenschen and untermenschen rather than just treating all as equally being menschen.
Whilst you (rightly!) point out and criticize the casual racism all over the place done with the traditional (Fascist) spin on racism, you seem to be totally oblivious to the Racism with the modern neoliberal spin which is just as unjust, prejudiced and discriminatory (hence just as Racist) as practiced in Germany, where it is systemic and even weaved into the structures of power (exactly as shown in this news story, with people being deported without trial for being against it), and the powerful activelly practicing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and suppressing criticism of it with laws that bypass the Courts, is a far, FAR worse situation than merely the powerless being casually racist.
The takeover of Israel by a nakedly ethno-Fascist regime which has started a full-blown Genocide along ethnic lines of proportions and cruelty exceeded only by the Holocaust, is what shined a harsh light on the reality that the whole business of presuming things and treating people based on their ethnicity is wrong even when you spin it as "positive", and Germany was so far down into Racism with that modern neoliberal spin that the country, unlike many other countries in Europe which also previously supported Israel, has been unable to pull itself out of it when it de facto transformed into support of a very extreme form of Fascist-style Racism.
Thanks for the lesson, but to be clear: I'm not oblivious to positive racism and don't support the authorities' actions from the news article. I just think it's a combination of multiple factors why support for Israel is as high as in Germany, and I think none of those is an instrinsically hightened disposition for racism.
I agree with that: I don't think any "people" has an intrinsically heightened disposition for racism.
In fact, if I thought otherwise I would be quite the hypocrite as that would be pure and simple racist prejudice.
What I do think is that the Press and Political environment in Germany for the past decades have promoted race-based thinking thus increasing the acceptance of racism and even a certain blindness to it because the dominant forms were "benevolent" racism. This is how Germany ended up were it is now: by the active normalizing of a dysfunctional behavior as being "benevolent" rather than due to predisposition of those living there for such things.
You see a lot of that too in places like the US were one party is Racist in the traditional sense and the other spins their Racism in the modern sense (but when it comes to, for example, Muslims, they're both traditional racists).
The really alarming thing is that rather than stop and re-evaluate that posture in light of how that ended up with the German Government supporting the most extreme Genocide of this century (so far :/ ) very overtly due to the race of the genociders, the German authorities have instead doubled down with authoritarian measures (IMHO, bypassing the Courts to expel dissidents is pretty authoritarian for a supposedly Democratic nation).
IMHO, such climate of race-based thinking and normalization of racial prejudice and discrimination (even if spinned as "positive") is also fertile ground for the growth of traditional racists such as the AfD in Germany and the MAGAs in America - the moral and ethical distance between "those people should be supported because of their race" and the traditional racists' "we should be supported because of our race" is much, much smaller than the distance between "people's race should not mater for how they are seen or treated" and "we should be supported because of our race" - "if it's OK to do it for them then it's OK to do it for us" is quite a tiny mental step.
I don't actually think that Germany is worse in this than for example the US, it's just that I had a far, far better opinion of Germany than I had of the US previously and the deep disappointment of figuring out the dark nature of racial policies in German Politics makes it hit me harder than what's happening in the US.
Germany‘s neo fascists use support for Israel as a fig leaf, „look we are no Nazis, we support the Jews this time!“. Same reason why Weidel dug up that ultra stupid theory that Hitler was actually a lefty socialist. Conveniently, said support also hurts people they actually really hate. A crooked sense of historical responsibility was the perfect circumstance.
I‘m otherwise happy to read up on those ideological foundations you mentioned that Germany couldn’t get rid of in post colonial Europe.
~~Jewish people are not an ethnicity. They are defined by religion.~~ Alright then, ethno-religious state; see below.
Jews are a classic example of an ethnoreligious group, being Jewish is not solely a question of religion. E.g. many Jews in the US identify as Jewish, but do not believe in Judaism. And religious hardliners in Israel have a very clear image of what kind of people can be real Jews.
Not necessarily, no. Organizers can publicly distance themselves from unwanted people beforehand and during speeches, as well as check people's banners and clothing, and that will generally help quite a bit.
I don't experience it like that. I think the right wing is genuinely split over whether to support a Jewish religiously-defined state or whether to support anything anti-Jewish.
which banners and clothing do you want to be censored? if you mean Free Palestine and from the river to the sea, don't even bother as you'd be outing yourself as a zionist
Primo job jumping to conclusions. I was naming examples of actions. How organizers implement them is not something I am going to have a say in anyway.
I am saying though that interactions like this are probably unnecessary: https://files.catbox.moe/ssct8w.mp4 If you don't understand German: The "reporter" is an Afd member who is asking a pro-Palestine protester about the historical Nazis and the protester responds that he likes the number "6 million" [as in 6 million Jews killed during Holocaust]. Also, ftr: I do not endorse using the Jandl quote over the video in this context.
I can't research this particular incident if all you give out is a video without sources from local media saying whether he experienced repercussions or not.
I don't get what this is supposed to prove, that anyone can put on a keffiyeh and say Nazi shit?
It's not local media, it's literally a nazi live streamer filming people for profit. Nonetheless, it's proving that it's not always hard to tease out actual antisemitism from a subset of the people attending pro-Palestine demonstrations. And I do find that a credibility issue.
I agree and also, what the fuck does this have to do with anti-genocide protesters getting deported?
That's how the thread evolved. It likely has nothing to do with the four people from the article though.