How Germany Deals With Neo-Nazis

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Brilliant read..

How Germany Deals With Neo-Nazis

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/opinion/germany-neo-nazis-charlottesville.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

 

Berlin — To many Germans, the violence in Charlottesville, Va., this month and the American president’s reaction to it came as a shock. Even those who have come to expect little of Donald Trump — he’s a uniquely unpopular figure among Germans — were aghast. “It’s racist, far-right violence, and that requires determined and forceful resistance no matter where in the world it appears,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

What a strange moment, when the German chancellor lectures the American president on how to deal with neo-Nazis. But it’s also an instructive one, in that it highlights how the two countries deal with extremism.

In Germany, the very presence of neo-Nazis openly marching through a city bearing swastika-emblazoned flags, as in Charlottesville, is unthinkable. Unlike the United States, Germany places strict limits on speech and expression when it comes to right-wing extremism. It is illegal to produce, distribute or display symbols of the Nazi era — swastikas, the Hitler salute, along with many symbols that neo-Nazis have developed as proxies to get around the initial law. Holocaust denial is also illegal.

The law goes further. There is the legal concept of “Volksverhetzung,” the incitement to hatred: Anybody who denigrates an individual or a group based on their ethnicity or religion, or anybody who tries to rouse hatred or promotes violence against such a group or an individual, could face a sentence of up to five years in prison.

These laws apply to individuals, but they and others are also defenses against extremist political parties. The Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, can ban parties it deems intent on impairing or destroying the political order. This year the court came close to banning the extremist right-wing National Democratic Party but determined the organization was too weak to outlaw.

This legal regime is backed by a political culture that effectively bans expression that might pass legal muster but still flirts with racist ideologies. The German right-wing-populist Alternative for Germany is a good example. Though its program and members do not openly embrace or reference Nazism, the party’s program dabbles in ideas that might be construed as racist, and as a result the party is considered untouchable by mainstream voters and politicians.

Germans have long argued over whether this legalistic strategy has worked. On the one hand, Germany’s democratic system is remarkably stable; on the other, it has a severe problem with right-wing extremist violence that again has been rising steeply since the refugee crisis of 2015. And our laws and cultural taboos have not prevented the Alternative party from gaining a small but steady 8 percent of voters ahead of the national election in September.

Edited August 23, 2017 by CaliCat