Mick Hartley

Meanwhile, closer to home:

On March 13, there were state elections in three German states: Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt. In all three states, the biggest winner was the “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) with 12.6 percent of the votes in Rhineland-Palatinate, 15.1 percent in Baden-Württemberg and unprecedented 24.3 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. With almost 11 million inhabitants, Baden-Württemberg is the third-biggest and third-most-populated state in Germany; the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Bosch are located there. As a result, Baden-Württemberg also has a very low rate of joblessness (3.7 percent compared to 6.4 percent in all of the FRG, which is an all-time low in Germany since the reunification in 1990). So much for those who believe that poverty or unemployment are the simple causes of right-wing extremism.

In late May and early June, public attention in Germany was focused on an elected AfD member of Parliament in Baden-Württemberg, Wolfgang Gedeon, a retired doctor and author who in 2012 published a pamphlet titled The Green Communism and the Dictatorship of Minorities. A Critique of the Western Zeitgeist. In that work, Gedeon argued against the “Judaization of Christianity” and the “Zionization of Western politics.” In particular, he took aim at the United States, whose foreign policy is run by Zionists. He also argued for “family values” while protesting against “ethno-suicide,” “the cult of being gay,” and the “holocaust of abortion.” Among Gedeon’s heroes is the imprisoned Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Horst Mahler, whom Gedeon calls a “dissident” fighting for a true German “national identity.” He mocks the Holocaust as a “civil religion,” an anti-Semitic term well-known not just from neo-Nazis, but also from anti-Zionist scholars….

Gedeon ends his anti-Semitic pamphlet by framing WWII as a “victory” for the United States (of course, it was) and “total defeat of Germany.” He is sad about the defeat for Germany and mocks the Nuremberg Trials. He trivializes the Shoah by equating the Soviet Gulag or Hiroshima with Auschwitz.

Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. For Gedeon, this is a result of policies by a “Zionist minority.” Similarly, immigration and antiracism are the result of Zionist—read: Jewish—conspiracy to undermine national identity—a classical anti-Semitic trope.

Green Communism has been displayed in recent years at AfD party conventions and no one had any problem with that, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has reported.

In June, head of the AfD fraction in the Parliament of Baden-Württemberg, Jörg Meuthen, previously a supporter of Gedeon, dismissed him and was joined by several other MPs. Gedeon left the fraction due to power games between Frauke Petry and Meuthen. The extreme-right-wing ideology of the AfD and Gedeon and his former allies did not change, though…..