Footnote: German Greens Demand State Subsidies for Antifa

Oh, 2020, what awesome year have you been…

And so it goes:

Here’s what Ms. Künast of the German Greens said on that 12 March 2020, according to the official Bundestag transcript (p. 18932, if you wish to fact-check it, search for that long noun Demokratiefördergesetz).

Wir brauchen ein Demokratiefördergesetz. Ich bin es, ehrlich gesagt, leid, dass wir seit Jahrzehnten dafür kämpfen, dass NGOs und Antifagruppen, die sich engagieren, nicht immer um ihr Geld ringen müssen und nur auf ein Jahr befristete Arbeitsverträge abschließen können.

And here’s my translation:

We need a law to promote democracy. I am, frankly, tired of the fact that we have been fighting for decades to ensure that NGOs and Antifa groups that get involved always have to fight for their money and therefore can only offer temporary employment contracts limited to a year.

What a brilliant idea! The state should use public funds to ‘promote democracy’ so that ‘NGOs and Antifa’ can offer permanent contracts to do their work.

Knowing what we know about either NGOs and Antifa, what could go wrong? (/sarcasm)

What’s in a Word, Specifically ‘Civil Society’?

For those not in the know, the Demokratiefördergesetz (an ‘Act to Promote Democracy’) is currently debated in the Bundestag. Critics consider parts of its handouts highly problematic. Here’s what the Neue Zürcher Zeitung had to say:

With the ‘Democracy Promotion Act’, the ‘traffic light’ wants to flatten the boundaries between state and society in favour of a politically one-sided concept of civil society.

According to the Federal Minister of the Interior, the declared aim is to provide ‘consistent financial support for civil society’. An answer from the federal government at the end of October states even more clearly that the law is intended to provide ‘more planning security for civil society’ [huhum, the gov’t wishes to fund more ‘planning’—where did I hear that one before?].

This formulation is absurd and fails to recognise the foundations of the liberal constitutional state. A civil society that is reduced to a recipient of payments from the state and thus to a budget item of the federal government is robbed of its core. It becomes dependent on the prevailing majorities. In this way, the longing for authority gives rise to new and ‘permanent’ subservience.

All of this is obviously correct. I’d merely add that by ‘civil society’ isn’t meant the likes of Joe and Jane Public. There’s an actually helpful Wikipedia entry on it, so here goes:

Civil society can be understood as the ‘third sector’ of society, distinct from government and business, and including the family and the private sphere. By other authors, civil society is used in the sense of 1) the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that advance the interests and will of citizens or 2) individuals and organizations in a society which are independent of the government.

Clearly, what the Stasi-infested federal gov’t of Germany is doing falls squarely outside the bounds of either ‘definition’. But wait, there’s more:

Robert D. Putnam has argued that even non-political organizations in civil society are vital for democracy because they build social capital, trust, and shared values within a society…

Others, however, have questioned the link between civil society and robust democracy…For example, Sheri Berman argued that civil society organizations can actually be used to mobilize people against democracy. This was evident in fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Weimar Republic’s failure to address the ravages of economic depression, and domestic struggles, led to the creation of a multitude of German civil societies. A defining and arguable fatal flaw of these groups was they reinforced societal conflicts and differences among Germans. This separation of German society into individual social groups meant they were incredibly vulnerable to nationalist ideals [in case you wonder, the Communist Party was the second-largest faction in 1932/33, and it was growing fast than even the NSDAP at that point]. Nazis infiltrated these discontent groups where they eventually became the backbone and foundation for the party and its propaganda. As a result, the Nazi party transformed itself from a place of political irrelevancy to the largest party in the German Reichstag after the 1932 elections [oh, how wonderful that kind of fake history works: see—Nazis evil, and the Great Depression and political violence on the streets had nothing to do with any of this]. Contrary to Putnam’s argument, in this instance, a dense civil society network had damaged democracy. The Nazi Party exploited the societal organization of Germany ultimately leading to the fall of the nation's first ever republic.

What else is to add here other than—I wish the people who write such nonsense would read, e.g., Dirk Schuman’s Political Violence in the Weimar Republic.

Then they’d perhaps better understand that what the current leftist gov’t of Germany is doing is—precisely following the Wikipedia (fake) version of history. I hope this increases the likelihood of their failure, but given everything I’ve seen in the past couple of years, it’s still going to be bad to let these clowns try.

*shudder*