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ER Editor: A two-fer. More wake-up reports for German public consumption. It’s wild out there in Narrative Land.
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How a German domestic spy agency classified a random man as a “potential right-wing extremist” for no reason and nearly ruined his life
EUGYPPIUS
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has published an amazing story about an anonymous professor in Hessen and his run-in with the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
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This is one of the sixteen state divisions of the German domestic intelligence apparatus whose agents I refer to affectionately as the constitutional protectors. Domestic intelligence agencies in other countries primarily busy themselves with things like terrorism and counter-espionage, but the constitutional protectors of the Federal Republic spend a great part of their time monitoring ordinary citizens for signs of political unreliability. They publish periodic reports autistically delineating all of the species and subspecies of political wrongthink they encounter among the rabble, they help orchestrate media smear campaigns and they selectively disclose their findings to employers and business associates, thereby ensuring that political offenders are appropriately ostracised for believing or saying or perhaps even just seeming to believe or say the wrong things.
The constitutional protectors have always been very bad, and this in at least two respects. Firstly, they are typical of the rest of German “defensive democracy,” in that their mission is malign, contradictory and faintly terrifying. Secondly, to judge from their annual reports, various assessments and public statements, they are screechingly incompetent. While I think everyone can agree that police states are pretty unpleasant places, ours is a unique nascent police state staffed by chubby bubble-writing female sociology majors, which makes it all worse and more humiliating.
Anyway, our professor – an economist – already lived and worked under a general cloud of political suspicion because he had once been a city councillor for Alternative für Deutschland.
He’d long since abandoned politics and left the AfD, but that hardly matters in the eyes of the constitutional protectors; there is never any coming back from fascism. Then, in September 2023, he took a trip to Berlin and found that his regular hotel was booked up, so he called an old friend who used to be his neighbour. This friend, Stephanie Elsässer (née Eckhardt), happens to be married to Jürgen Elsässer, “right-wing-extreme” editor of Compact magazine – the very same Compact magazine that was briefly (and unconstitutionally) banned by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. Our professor asked the Elsässers to put him up for the night and they offered him their guest room.
The constitutional protectors must have had the Elsässer home under surveillance; that’s the only way this story makes sense. …
ER: See our previous reporting on the German government’s treatment of Compact editor Jurgen Elsasser HERE.
CONTINUE READING HERE
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German Banks Cut Ties with the Sovereigntist AfD
The AfD defends conservative values and opposes illegal migration. According to German banks, this makes the party ‘far-right’—leading to the closure of local AfD branches’ accounts.
TEC NEWS
Two regional banks in Western Germany have closed the accounts of local branches of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), continuing a broader trend of corporate hostility to the poll-topping political party.
The Verbund Volksbank OWL and Volksbank in Ostwestfalen confirmed that they had terminated the AfD Minden-Lübbecke district’s accounts, while declining to provide reasons, citing banking secrecy laws. The AfD condemned the move as politically motivated “debanking.”
Local AfD chairman Sebastian Landwehr said there had been “no misconduct” and accused the banks of targeting “Germany’s biggest opposition party.”
The closures follow similar actions in other German regions. In recent months, Volksbank Düsseldorf-Neuss, Berliner Volksbank and Deutsche Kreditbank have all ended their relationships with AfD branches or politicians.
This comes after Germany’s domestic intelligence agency formally classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation”—partly in response to it opposing unfettered illegal migration—in May, granting authorities and private institutions greater legal latitude to distance themselves from the party.
While cooperative Volksbanken is not legally required to maintain party accounts, public-law Sparkassen institutions must do so under German constitutional protections for political parties, leaving them as the AfD’s remaining banking option.
About a year ago an AfD lawmaker in Thuringia, Sascha Schlösser, also had his bank account closed for unknown reasons, highlighting a growing pattern of account terminations affecting the party.
Berliner Volksbank also shuttered the AfD’s federal donation account after a petition from the activist group ‘Grandmothers Against the Right’ (Omas gegen Rechts).
Source
Featured image source, AfD: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-far-right-afds-donation-account-shut-down/a-69562072
Featured image source, surveillance: https://edri.org/our-work/german-constitutional-court-stops-mass-surveillance-abroad/
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