More European "Political" News
Bad Signs in Poland, Germany, and the UK, and One Possibly False-Alarm in France
Poland:
There have been some pretty troubling signs, including that classic move of third-world coups, the seizure of a television station, upon the new Donald Tusk led-coalition’s taking power in January.
For a more-alarmist and earlier account, see “Poland and the Demon in Democracy,” by the always-worthwhile N.S. Lyons. He assumes it all amounts to a “constitutional crisis.” (By the way, Lyons’s title refers to this fine book from six years ago by Polish political philosopher and PiS politician Ryszard Legutko, one I discussed on the old version of Pomocon, and more than once.)
For a more-sober account, see the more recent one by our friend Daniel Mahoney, “Progressive ‘Democracy’ Strikes Back.” Mahoney is confident that Tusk’s coalition, whose shocking moves he characterizes as essentially “authoritarian,” has seriously overreached:
The new Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk (who served as the President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019) is hardly liberal in any recognizable sense of the term. It treats members of the Law and Justice Party and its supporters as enemies of democracy in an occupied country that needs to be purged of authoritarian elements and retrograde thinking. It thus represents the authoritarian face of the new “anti-authoritarianism.”
For more backstory, see the Chris Caldwell interview Titus posted a month ago here—the sections on Poland are 21:30-45:00, and 55:00-58:00.
Mahoney’s piece also links to older Caldwell work on Polish politics.
Germany:
The top German Covid/Vax-Disaster dissident writer on Substack, Eugyppius, recently gave us this rather-alarming headline:
Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the "thought and speech patterns" of its own people
The piece itself reveals that these are proposals, ones particularly recommended by two outright enemies of liberal democracy which the German people have somehow placed in office, Nancy Faeser and Thomas Haldenwang.
One aspect of the piece concerns how some of these proposals toy with outlawing the conservative-populist AfD party; on Afd generally, Caldwell is helpful above, at 58:30-103:00 & 129:00-136:00, though do keep in mind his more old-fashioned way of defining “populism” and the “right,” shared at 109:00-111:20.
But here is what Eugyppius says:
Alternative für Deutschland find themselves in the targets of our nominally democratic priesthood not because they are extremely right-wing, or racist, or xenophobic or anything like that. Politically, they’re hardly different from the CDU of the 1980s. Their real crime is having achieved enough strength to threaten the establishment ecosystem. The stronger AfD become, the harder it will prove for the reigning parties to form anti-AfD coalitions. Some of these parties, like the FDP, seem destined to disappear entirely; others, like the SPD, fear a future of permanent irrelevance. The once-dominant centre-right CDU, meanwhile, will find itself unable to form workable governments with partners on the left, and thus without any excuse not to enact the mild nationalism that a clear majority of voters demand, and that is so deeply out of fashion with our globalist rulers.
This is the purpose of the unceasing, astroturfed agitation “against the right” that the establishment have visited upon Germany for over a month now.
But it is not just AfD that is in the crosshairs, but liberal democracy itself:
[Nancy Faeser’s] “package of measures” to combat “the right” are some of the most openly antidemocratic, dictatorial policies I have ever seen any Western politician articulate. In other nations these kinds of things are surely said behind closed doors, but in Germany they are printed in all the major papers. You can only imagine what these people contemplate in secret.
I won’t try to go through these horrid proposals, the ones sketched in the headline —read Eugyppius’ whole piece; suffice it to say that, if these proposals go through, that once you get classified as an “extremist,” which apparently, support for AfD is sufficient evidence of, you’ll become an essentially a second-class citizens, perhaps even banned from standard banking and travel.
Moreover, some of these proposals would create a situation wherein, even if AfD or similarly “defined as extremist” politicians win elections, their role as representatives will become significantly hemmed in: they would not be given the regular intelligence reports that other reps are, for one thing. Eugyppius sees where this leads:
…the Federal Republic of Germany will develop a politics not unlike the bloc party system of the old DDR [East Germany]. The bloc parties were mere satellites that governed in nominal partnership with the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), generally approving all SED proposals. While Germany would not have a clear ruling party like the SED, the freezing of the political ecosystem [by banning or hobbling AfD] would formalise the present role of the Green Party as king-makers…
To maintain such a system – and to make it resilient to undesirable electoral outcomes – it will prove necessary to insulate the political police from political oversight. Powerful people are already thinking about this, especially in the east, where AfD are so strong they have a serious chance of entering government after the September elections:
If the constitutional protectors are allowed to screen their own elected overseers, the transformation of Germany into a pseudodemocracy will be very nearly complete. The political police will select minders who are amenable to their enforcement programme, and thereby come to operate as semi-autonomous secret police.
Eugyppius is not the only one noticing, but as far as I am aware, he is one of the few writers on German affairs in English to be thinking the logic of these proposals through to their destination, which is the transformation of liberal democracy into pseudodemocracy, a situation where the elites and their voting supporters not only twist and rewrite the rules of the game “democratic politics,” but determine in advance who gets to play. It’s like what American progressivists want to do to Trump and his voters, but on steroids and out loud, with none of the hesitations that come with our progressivists’ glances at the courts and the Constitution, and their half-serious pronouncements about “the rule of law.”
Alas, Germany may be showing us in the near-future that half-serious is something!
Of course, I do not know how to assess Eugyppius’s sense, conveyed throughout the piece, that not a few of the measures he’s highlighting have a good chance of becoming official edicts (I won’t give them the dignity of calling them “laws”); perhaps our Titus, or misters Mahoney or Caldwell, would be better ones to ask about that.
Oh, and let’s not forget the “good news” story from Germany, back from January: leftist Covid/Vax-Disaster dissident C.J. Hopkins was acquitted!
But certainly, the mere fact of the bizarre tyrannical charges brought against him, and that they were actually brought to trial, diminish the good news quite a bit. One doesn’t say “Hooray for Dunkirk!” after all; one merely thanks God that the disaster there was made much less worse than it could have been.
From Hopkins’s defense speech:
And here I am, in criminal court in Berlin, accused of disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda in two Tweets about mask mandates. The German authorities have had my speech censored on the Internet, and have damaged my reputation and income as an author. One of my books has been banned by Amazon in Germany. All this because I criticized the German authorities, because I mocked one of their decrees, because I pointed out one of their lies…
The two Tweets at issue here feature a swastika covered by one of the medical masks that everyone was forced to wear in public during 2020 to 2022. That is the cover art of my book. The message conveyed by this artwork is clear. In Nazi Germany, the swastika was the symbol of conformity to the official ideology. During 2020 to 2022, the masks functioned as the symbol of conformity to a new official ideology. That was their purpose. Their purpose was to enforce people’s compliance with government decrees and conformity to the official Covid-pandemic narrative, most of which has now been proven to have been propaganda and lies.
Read his whole piece on the acquittal. And alas, the German authorities aren’t done with Hopkins, though that gives him more chances, I guess, to state his harsh truths about their descent into a new kind of totalitarianism.
France:
A couple of weeks ago, in the course of presenting the state of his court-struggle against the censoring and silencing moves of the Most Free-Speech Trampling U.S. Presidential Administration Ever, Aaron Kheriaty reported this from France:
Take the case of France, for example, which has moved from censorship of disfavored speech to criminalization of dissenting opinions. This week, a law was passed in France qualifying any opposition to covid mRNA injections as a “sectarian aberration”. It carries a penalty of up to 3 years imprisonment and 45,000 euros. The suppression of medical dissent under a law that critics are calling the “Pfizer article” has been passed by the French Parliament. Censorship, as I have argued, is incompatible with science, but criminalization pushes France ever further in the direction of totalitarianism. Even France's Conseil d'Etat—a governmental body that acts both as legal adviser to the executive branch and as the supreme court for administrative justice—condemned the law as a disproportionate and unjustified attack on freedom to express dissenting scientific and medical opinions.
Now, I will let others chime in on the p’s and q’s of where things stand with this, but I have since seen several prominent Covid/Vax Disaster writers say that the initial reports exaggerated the threat of the bill, and, that French politicians are well on the road to revising the key clauses.
So probably a false alarm.
Still, folks with serious power in France’s system were seriously toying with a law built upon phrases like sectarian aberration? (From Kheriaty’s link, I believe the French is les dérives sectaires.) We are to be comforted by the usual suspects labelling this story a specimen of misinformation?
U.K.
Always good to toss a John Campbell video in; this one’s on the ONS deciding to change the statistics on excess deaths:
There’s so much more I could report, but enough for now, and let’s take it out with this classic freedom-anthem of our day, from a citizen of that “green and pleasant land,” one Tommy Coyle: