Politics & Stuff

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Israel-Gaza war live: Nationwide general strike in Israel amid public anger over hostage deaths and failed ceasefire talks

Strike set to affect main airport as well as government offices, schools and business

• See all our Israel-Gaza coverage

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/02/israel-gaza-war-live-israel-faces-nationwide-general-strike-amid-public-anger-over-hostage-deaths-and-failed-ceasefire-talks

Edited September 2, 2024 by Vesper

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[cosmicway 1,333]

6 hours ago, Vesper said:

Success of far-right AfD shows east and west Germany are drifting further apart

Likely win in Thuringia and second place in Saxony highlight how eastern voters are asserting their own political identity

• German far-right party AfD poised for state election victory in east

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/success-far-right-afd-shows-east-west-germany-drifting-further-apart

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together”.

How optimistic that image of organic healing sounds 35 years on. Tonight’s historic election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further apart.

The far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a populist wave across Europe’s largest economy. If federal elections were held tomorrow, recent polls suggest the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag.

But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after emerging top in a state election for the first time ever, on at least 30% of the vote.

And in none of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the latter slightly ahead in exit polls.

In Brandenburg, the state that surrounds the capital, Berlin, the AfD is also expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month.

As long as the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far right and prevent it from gaining a majority, its dreams of seizing power will probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD’s establishment as a dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s political identity and how it contain the rise of such forces in the future.

For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.

But economics and demographics only go so far to explain the outcome of Sunday’s votes. The population of the east is older than that in the west, but it is no longer demographically “bleeding out” as it was during the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed. In fact, every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.

Unemployment is higher, but only by a fraction – the real contrast here is between northern and southern Germany. For the last two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern lands. Levels of immigration in the eastern states that went to the polls on Sunday night are among the lowest in the whole of Germany.

According to a survey published by Olaf Scholz’s government at the start of this year, about 19% of east Germans say they feel left behind. That is twice as many as in the west (8%), but would still suggest that 80% of the population of the five eastern states do not feel they are losing out. Yet a sizeable number of them cast their votes for a party that, in its Thuringian branch, has been certified as rightwing extremist.

The eastern-born sociologist Steffen Mau has coined the term ossifikation for this trend – a play on the slang term for former GDR citizens and the biological process by which tissue hardens into bone. Far from still “catching up”, Mau writes in his recent book Ungleich Vereint (Unequally Unified), east Germany is voting differently from the west precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.

In her book Tausend Aufbrüche (A Thousand Starts), which won this year’s top German nonfiction prize, the GDR-born historian Christina Morina says the AfD is winning in the east because it has managed to tap into a distinctive understanding of what democracy entails, which was shaped by 40 years under communist rule and remains different from that in the west.

This might sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.

“East Germany too claimed for itself to have found a democratic response to national socialism,” Morina told the Guardian in a recent interview. “It’s just that the communists’ story of how democracy worked was a deeply populist one, which claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and representing the interests of capitalism.”

The historic experience of that kind of pseudo-democracy, she argued, was one explanation for why the AfD was managing to mobilise so many more previous non-voters in the east than other parties.

Unlike the established centrist parties, the AfD has not only held rallies on the campaign trail, but organised spaziergänge, “strolls” through town centres, which are designed to evoke the peaceful Monday protests that accompanied the unravelling of socialist East Germany. It is the only party in Germany that calls for the president to be directly elected by citizens rather than through a federal convention, and has advocated for a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular referendums.

“In its election campaigns, the AfD very effectively tapped into an experience that is widely shared among east Germans,” said Morina. “That you don’t make yourself heard through voting, by engaging yourself in political parties, civic groups or unions, but by mobilising the masses for street protests.”

There is every reason to distrust the AfD’s claim to merely represent a different democratic tradition. Underlying its story of empowerment lies a deeply racist strand of thinking, which casts easterners as more pure Germans because they resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered the West German discourse after the student revolutions of 1968.

But both Mau and Morina suggest that winning back voters from the far right can only work by engaging them directly through unconventional and creative means, such as local citizens’ assemblies. To halt and eventually reverse the drifting apart of Germany’s east and west, the political centre needs to start thinking outside the box.

 

All these politicaal ideologies existed since anyone can remember.
Perhaps the landscape as we know it now was created around the year 1920, one century ago.

I can speak for Greece.
We have from right to left:

- the blackies
- ok1 (New Democracy)
- ok2 (socialists)
- ok3 (left)
- the commies

50-60 years ago there were some marked differances but no fundamental ones if you look at it closely.

In the old world however, before the nineties, it was the socialists who were slowly gaining momentum.
They were doing various socialist things, such as accepting false tax returns in return for a small bribe, but life was easier. Along the seaside all the beach clubs
were lit, in Kolonaki square people were going about in kimonos and girls were selling flowers.

What's the difference now and people are drifting towards the juntist camp ?
I will tell you what the real difference is:

It's sex.
Sexual life has been eroded.
Metoo and other strange movements have become the order of the day.
Even pinup girls in magazines look drab.

Back in time even Billy Carter tried to have a go at Anouar Sadat's wife, to be scolded by the White House of course but it was the age of innocence.
So now without sex life, the old zombie ghosts are coming back to life.

Edited September 2, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,225]

1 minute ago, cosmicway said:

What's the difference now and people are drifting towards the juntist camp ?
I will tell you what the real difference is:

It's sex.
Sexual life has been eroded.
Metoo and other strange movements have become the order of the day.
Even pinup girls in magazines look drab.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, Vesper said:

 

But true.

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

 

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40 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

 

But true.

Social media and now AI.

from 40 years ago.................

World Destruction

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

4 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Social media and now AI.

from 40 years ago.................

World Destruction

 

Look  it's simple like Columbus's egg.
When you want to make sex with somebody it means you become friends.
Never heard of people having sex and being enemies.
You even pass to her/him useful stock exchange information.
Now all this is gone.
So we have the French against the Belgians, the Germans against the Poles, the Italians against the Swiss and so on and so forth.
 

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10 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

'they claim a divine right to commit horrific acts'

pretty much sums it up

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Just now, cosmicway said:

Never heard of people having sex and being enemies.

you need to go look at married couples who are on the downslope to divorce, lololol

[Vesper 30,225]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Columbus's egg

Columbi ägg (1924) by the Swedish artist Nils von Dardel

Edited September 2, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

you need to go look at married couples who are on the downslope to divorce, lololol

That's neither here nor there.
Some deeper concepts are involved causing the effect, such as the rapid flow of information, technology gone haywire.

[Vesper 30,225]

lol

zionist jew fail

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

8 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

This is just another nail in the coffin of the decaying US justice system. Alex Jones, my vocabulary (in any language) fails me here, is another obvious case of how some people are simply untouchable these days. It just seems easier than it used to be to avoid real consequences, so we will be seeing more of that unfortunately.

I don't expect anything to go through against Trump; he has incriminated himself so many times... out of the so many lies he tells, as well as his crazy hyperbolic nonsense, the one thing he was right about was, "I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters" except that he wouldn't go to prison either.

Edited September 2, 2024 by robsblubot

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What should Labour aim for in Europe?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/what-should-labour-aim-for-in-europe

The new government’s goals are modest. But economic reality may force it to follow changing public opinion.

 

In its campaign for the general election in the United Kingdom in July, Labour generally kept a low profile on the UK’s departure in 2020 from the European Union. In government, the party said, it would not seek to rejoin the EU—not even the customs union or the single market—despite the outgoing Conservatives being on the defensive on this issue.

Public opinion now firmly holds that ‘Brexit’, stemming from the referendum to that effect in 2016, was a mistake. Only 31 per cent say it was the right decision—indeed, some polls suggest over 60 per cent would vote to rejoin the EU if that question were put to a referendum now.

Improving relationships

What Labour did say in its manifesto was that it would pursue ‘an improved and ambitious relationship with our European partners’. And, since the election, it has moved swiftly to re-establish cordial contacts.

Concretely, the new Labour government is likely to seek, first, to reduce some of the barriers to UK-EU trade. This would include a veterinary agreement, mutual recognition of professional qualifications, visa exemptions for touring performers (such as musicians and actors) and regulatory alignments in key sectors such as chemicals.

An opportunity to do this could arise through the scheduled ‘review’ of the post-Brexit trade and co-operation agreement, concluded when Boris Johnson was premier, due next year. But on that there are various views on mainland Europe about whether the fundamentals can be revised.

A second goal would be to negotiate a security agreement with the EU. This could turn out to be of great significance, given the situation in Ukraine, especially if Donald Trump were to be re-elected as president of the United States in November. It would include security in the widest sense—not just military co-operation but sanctions, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, fighting traffickers, combating climate change and more. The German ambassador to Britain recently advocated a UK-EU ‘security and co-operation agreement’, which would also include agriculture and visa rules.

A third avenue would be to rejoin some of the EU’s technical agencies (at least as an observer or associate member), such as Europol. Finally, the shared commitment to achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse-gas emissions remains to be built on, with co-operation on climate and energy presumably embracing cross-border energy interconnectors and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

This is all well and good. And the new administration might also seek renewed participation in the Erasmus+ student-mobility scheme. The Johnson government pulled out despite the withdrawal arrangements specifically providing for continued involvement—a piece of gratuitous cultural vandalism.

Over-cautious

But the realities of government may force Labour to go further, more quickly. The biggest challenges it faces are the catastrophic state of the public finances and the lethargy of the economy.

After years of austerity, there are pressures for higher public spending on multiple fronts. Yet with both public debt and taxes as shares of gross domestic product heading towards levels not seen since the aftermath of the second world war, finding an extra £3 billion here or £4 billion there has become the subject of intense debates. These figures are however dwarfed by the £40 billion a year of lost tax revenue caused by Brexit.

Economic ‘growth’ was very much the maxim of Labour’s campaign. Yet growth cannot be rekindled while ignoring the annual 4 per cent loss to GDP attributed to Brexit by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, the lost trade with the UK’s main export market (and main source of its supply chains) and the extra transaction costs on businesses imposed by Brexit.

Labour’s over-cautious red lines at the hustings—no to rejoining the customs union, no to full single-market membership—will severely limit the potential improvements it can bring in government. There will be costly border checks for as long as there is a customs border. Frictionless trade in goods (no extra conformity tests, value-added-tax forms, export permits, labelling requirements and so on), including with the wider European Economic Area, will remain a chimera unless the UK aligns with the single-market rules and standards it helped set and endorsed as a member. And there will be little scope to improve trade in services—even for touring performers and musicians—without some freedom of movement.

Biggest beneficiaries

What is holding the new government back? It seems to be a belief that full participation in the single market would require full restoration of the freedom of movement enjoyed by EU citizens. This is seen as an insurmountable obstacle, given the public concerns about record levels of immigration to Britain. Yet most migration to Britain is from outside the EU, which is (as it always was) a matter for national regulation. Within the limits of international law, it is for the UK itself to decide how open or restrictive it wants to be.

The lesser (now much less) migration from the EU was part and parcel of free movement, of which Britons were actually the biggest beneficiaries, with more of them living in other member states than was the case for any other nationality. This freedom was not however unconditional: those exercising it had to find work or be self-sufficient—conditions which Britain failed to enforce, but could if free movement (perhaps referred to as ‘conditional free movement’ to emphasise this point) were to be restored. Nor was it a cost to the UK exchequer: EU citizens in Britain paid far more in taxes than they received in benefits and services combined.

Far from enabling the UK to ‘take back control’ of its borders, Brexit has removed key tools for so doing. In the EU, Britain could use the internal agreement that asylum-seekers should be processed by the country in which they first arrived. One could waive that rule, as Germany did. But Britain used it to send thousands of asylum-seekers back to the member state of initial arrival—something it can no longer do.

The UK was also able to participate fully in the EU’s system of co-operation among police and intelligence forces. This meant it could, when needed, obtain information on individuals when they arrived at the border, from fingerprints to criminal records. It also meant co-operating to fight international gangs of people traffickers. Brexit was a shot in the foot as regards its supposed major benefit of controlling the border.

Maybe popular

If economic reality forces the Labour government to go further, and at least to rejoin the single market and the customs union—even if that includes ‘conditional’ free movement with EU members—it will find that this does not throw up as many problems as it fears. It may even be popular.

Many businesses, universities, artists and others want it. So do Labour Party members. Above all, if the tracker polls show that public opinion continues its gradual but relentless shift in favour of rejoining the EU, then surely these smaller steps, at least, should be easier.

 

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Taxing the super-rich—more possible than ever

https://www.socialeurope.eu/taxing-the-super-rich-more-possible-than-ever

The concentration of wealth is a global issue and it is getting worse.

 

A mere 3,000 people have amassed $14.4 trillion in wealth, the equivalent of 13 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. While the world’s billionaires controlled less than 3 per cent of global GDP in 1993, the growth of their wealth and political influence has since accelerated.

Regardless of nationality, the world’s ultra-rich share two striking similarities: the vast majority are men and they typically pay much less tax, as a share of their income, than their employees and middle-class workers in general. The concentration of wealth is thus a global issue, one so alarming that the G20 (the group comprising the world’s largest developed and emerging economies) formally addressed it last month.

As G20 finance ministers put it in the final declaration at their conference in Rio de Janeiro in late July,

It is important for all taxpayers, including ultra-high-net-worth individuals, to contribute their fair share in taxes. Aggressive tax avoidance or tax evasion of ultra-high-net-worth individuals can undermine the fairness of tax systems … Promoting effective, fair, and progressive tax policies remains a significant challenge that international tax cooperation and targeted domestic reforms could help address.

Fiscal equity underpins democracy. Without sufficient tax revenues, governments cannot guarantee adequate services such as education, healthcare and social protection, nor can they respond to much larger problems such as the climate crisis (which is already destabilising many countries around the world). Given the dire consequences of inaction in these areas, it is imperative that the wealthiest pay their fair share of taxes.

Important milestone

The Rio declaration is an important milestone. For the first time since the G20 was established in 1999, all members agreed that the way the super-rich were taxed must be fixed and they committed themselves to doing it. But this consensus did not come out of nowhere. Advocates of tax fairness covered much ground in the months leading up to the summit.

Brazil occupies the G20’s rotating presidency this year and in late February the country’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, invited me to speak at a high-level meeting in São Paulo. I was commissioned to write a report on tax fairness and taxation of the super-rich (the focus of my work as founder and director of the EU Tax Observatory in Paris), which I submitted in late June, to inform the July summit discussion.

In the report, A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals, I advanced a proposal for a new effective taxation standard which included a co-ordinated minimum tax of 2 per cent of wealth for such individuals—the world’s 3,000 billionaires. This standard would not only generate significant revenue (around $200-250 billion per year). It would also correct the structural injustice of contemporary tax systems, whereby billionaires’ effective tax rates are lower than for middle-class individuals.

Overwhelming support

The global public overwhelmingly supports fair taxation of the ultra-rich. According to an Ipsos poll in G20 countries, released in June, 67 per cent agree that there is too much economic inequality and 70 per cent support the principle that wealthy people should pay higher income-tax rates.

The Rio declaration signals a significant shift: world leaders can no longer support a system in which the ultra-rich get away with paying less in taxes than the rest of us. Finance ministers have already agreed to important preliminary steps to improve tax transparency, enhance tax co-operation and review harmful tax practices.

True, there was no political consensus to include the 2 per cent minimum tax on billionaires in the final text. The declaration had to be approved unanimously and some countries still have reservations about some aspects of the proposal. For example, while the United States administratiion under Joe Biden supports a billionaire minimum tax domestically, it has been reluctant to advance the issue on the international stage.

No going back

But there is no going back. The minimum tax is now on the agenda and, looking at the history of international tax negotiations, there are concrete reasons to be optimistic about the proposal’s future. In 2013, the G20 acknowledged multinational companies’ rampant tax avoidance, giving political momentum to address the issue. Its initial action plan included improving tax transparency, enhancing tax co-operation and reviewing harmful tax practices—the same wording now used in Rio. Then, in October 2021, 136 countries and territories (now 140) adopted a 15 per cent minimum corporation tax.

Fortunately, we do not need all countries to adopt a 2 per cent minimum tax on billionaires (or on centi-millionaires, if that is what policy-makers decide). We simply need a critical mass of countries to agree on a set of rules to identify and value the wealth of the ultra-rich and to adopt instruments to impose effective taxation, regardless of the billionaires’ tax residency. This way, we can avoid a scenario where the ultra-rich flee to fiscal havens, thus ending the race to the bottom among countries competing to offer billionaires the lowest tax rate.

Over the last ten years or so, international co-operation on taxation has improved significantly. The introduction of automatic exchanges of bank information, for example, has greatly reduced the possibility of tax avoidance. We already have the tools needed to make the world’s billionaires pay their fair share of taxes. It’s now up to the governments to act quickly and effectively.

 

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https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/hitler-rise-to-power-how-democracies-can-give-way-to-dictatorships-by-mark-jones-5-2024-08

Aug 30, 2024

Mark Jones

In the face of renewed threats to democracy, historical knowledge of past dictatorships becomes as important as ever. After all, the Holocaust and World War II show what can happen when democracies allow themselves to be undermined from within.

DUBLIN – In the spring of 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor, Thomas Mann was on holiday in Switzerland with his wife. While there, the Nobel laureate author received a warning from Germany that it would be unsafe for him to return. Now that the Nazis were in power, they wanted to send Mann to a concentration camp for having publicly opposed them.

Mann thus became one of the first German refugees from Hitler’s regime. Until 1938, he spent most of his time in Switzerland. But as Hitler’s power increased and war in Europe looked increasingly likely, he moved to the United States, where he did not stay silent. Even at the height of Hitler’s conquests in Europe, Mann remained doggedly optimistic, promising Americans that “democracy will win” in the end.

Will it, though? Many nowadays are not so sure. As authors like Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University remind us, we are living in a new age of the “strongman,” with democracy retreating in many parts of the world. Hate-inspired violence is becoming more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and things that were once unthinkable have become normalized. This November, in the country where Mann once promised that democracy would prevail, tens of millions of Americans will vote for a candidate who responded to losing the 2020 election by instigating a fascist-style assault on the US Capitol.

The Past as Prologue

Given the need to defend democracy, historical knowledge has become more important than ever. Fortunately, in the lead-up to this year’s US election, historians Richard J. Evans and Timothy W. Ryback have each published books that mine the past to offer guidelines for navigating our increasingly concerning present.

Evans, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, is the more distinguished of the two authors. A prolific historian, he first came to public prominence in the early 2000s for his role as an expert witness in a libel case brought by the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and the historian Deborah Lipstadt. Evans played a key role in the trial, clashing with Irving in courtroom scenes that were later dramatized in the 2016 film Denial.

Up until then, Evans’s major works had largely focused on nineteenth-century Germany; but following the case, he moved forward in time to write a critically acclaimed three-volume social and political history of Nazi Germany, published between 2003 and 2008. Alongside Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, which focuses on the life of the dictator, Evans’s trilogy remains among the most important general works on Nazi Germany.

By contrast, Ryback, an American historian who serves as director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, has never written a general history of Nazism. He is best known for his 2008 best-seller, Hitler’s Private Library, a cleverly conceived study in which the dictator responsible for the “industrial production of corpses” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase) is also revealed to have been a book lover and an avid reader. Then came Ryback’s 2014 book, Hitler’s First Victims, which offered a forensic account of the SS’s first excesses of violence in the concentration camp at Dachau (where the Nazis wanted to send Mann) in 1933.

Fateful Decisions

For all their differences, Evans and Ryback both see German history as a powerful lens through which to view the problems currently facing liberal democracy. Thus, Evans sees the fall of the Weimar Republic as “the paradigm of democracy’s collapse and dictatorship’s triumph,” and Ryback begins his book Takeover in early August 1932, just days after the Nazis reached their electoral high point.

Following a summer of violent street fighting between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists, Hitler’s party won 37% of the vote and 230 seats in the Reichstag in the election on July 31, 1932. The magnitude of the Nazis’ triumph led Hitler to assume that he was entitled to the position of chancellor. But German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose office was supposed to serve as a guardian of the constitution, disagreed.

At a meeting on August 13, 1932, Hindenburg snubbed Hitler and used emergency powers available to him under the Weimar constitution to support the chancellorship of arch-conservative Franz von Papen, the leader of the cabinet that Hindenburg had appointed on June 1, 1932. Papen’s government was entirely dependent on Hindenburg’s support and lacked an electoral mandate of any kind. It was so stacked with aristocratic conservatives that it was known as the “cabinet of barons.”

In late summer 1932, shocking scenes played out in the briefly reconvened German parliament. Reichstag President Hermann Göring, who had received the position in August thanks to the votes of his fellow Nazi Party members, abused the position to humiliate Papen by ignoring him in the Chamber before the Nazis and Communists joined forces to vote through a no-confidence motion in Papen’s government. Hindenburg then called yet another election for that November. But when this failed to produce a workable parliamentary majority, he changed his mind about who should be chancellor, this time appointing General Kurt von Schleicher. Like Papen, Schleicher lacked an electoral mandate, but he did have the support of the army and business.

Schleicher’s cabinet lasted for just eight weeks. Angry about being dismissed, Papen conspired against the new chancellor and sought Hitler’s support for a new government. When Schleicher demanded more support from Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933, the aging president decided to push him to the side.

On January 30, 1933, with Papen’s encouragement, Hindenburg appointed Hitler, who had served as a corporal when Hindenburg was field marshal. The new chancellor would head a coalition government surrounded by “respectable” conservatives led by Papen. The latter believed that he had “boxed” Hitler in, and that he would be able to control and manipulate the new chancellor to force through his own conservative agenda.

Contingencies and Counterfactuals

Ryback offers a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues and scheming that occurred during the 170 days between Hindenburg and Hitler’s meeting on August 13, 1932, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. The figures who feature most prominently include Hitler and his inner circle; his Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser; his rivals for the chancellery, Papen and Schleicher; the conservative politician and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg; and the aging but fully lucid Hindenburg. Ryback’s narrative mixes their voices in with those of contemporary newspapers, including a large selection of quotations from the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent, as well as illustrative observations from well-known diarists like Harry Graf von Kessler.

Written with verve and close attention to detail, Takeover will be a successful book. But is it a good one? Ryback succeeds in capturing the hectic nature of events and the intrigues and scheming that continuously shifted the key players’ positions and prospects. He also offers a powerful historical message: while Nazism was once explained as the product of centuries of German history, the truth is that the story could have turned in another direction right up until the final minutes before Hitler became chancellor. Even on the morning of January 30, 1933, there was a last-gasp debate about whether to back out and abandon the envisaged coalition. There is human agency at every moment in history.

But this point, however well delivered, isn’t really new. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy, published in 2018, is just as much of a page-turner, and it includes a closer examination of why things happened as they did, making it a superior book. Takeover, by contrast, includes hardly any analysis of the Germans who opposed Nazism during the winter of 1932-33. The speeches that ultimately forced Mann to flee the country are not included in Ryback’s story, nor is the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. All we get are a few passing quotes from a Social Democratic newspaper.

This is a glaring omission. In March 1933, just minutes before the passage of the Nazi’s Enabling Act (the legal starting point of the dictatorship), the Social Democratic politician Otto Wels addressed the Reichstag and bravely defended “humanity” and democracy as “eternal” values that would outlive Nazism. As he spoke, he had a suicide pill in his pocket, fearing that he might be arrested and handed over to Nazi torturers immediately afterwards.

Takeover tells us nothing about this scene or the man at its center. This is not only because Ryback ends his book on January 30, 1933, thus leaving out the process by which the dictatorship was created (for that, readers should turn to Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days). More fundamentally, it is because the choices facing those who fought Nazism do not feature in Ryback’s story. Yet as recent events in the Democratic Party have shown, those who oppose populists do have choices, and they can use them to re-energize the defense of democracy.

The Hitler Circle

Evans also says little about the Germans who opposed Nazism, though he does discuss Wels when providing context for Hitler’s establishment of a dictatorship. Hitler’s People is a collection of 24 biographies, each of which tells us something important about who the Nazis were and how the regime worked. Evans starts with Hitler and spends 100 pages providing a short but comprehensive biography of the one-time nobody who became the leader of the Third Reich.

The next section includes chapters on Hitler’s inner circle, whose personal proximity to the leader gave them unique positions within the overall history of the Nazi regime. Among these “paladins,” as Evans calls them, are familiar names such as Göring, the former fighter pilot who rose to become the “second man” in the Third Reich; Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the secret police and the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust; and Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s top propagandist.

Evans next focuses on those just outside the inner circle, such as Julius Streicher, Nazi Germany’s most notorious antisemitic propagandist and a key figure in the Holocaust, as well as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Hans Frank, all of whom bore direct responsibility for the murder of millions of people.

These shorter biographical profiles are all important and well worth reading, but even more disturbing is a third cluster that Evans calls “The Instruments”: the people through whom the top officials carried out their vision of a Nazified world order. Of the nine biographies in this section, the only name many readers will recognize is Leni Riefenstahl. After 1945, the director of Triumph of the Will, the most important propaganda film made about Hitler during the Third Reich, presented herself to the world as an apolitical non-Nazi and got away with it.

The other “instruments” need to be better known, especially in the context of our current politics. They include the generals who ignored the international laws of war; the men and women who ran concentration camps and shot and tortured prisoners for fun; the doctors who killed sick children; and the women who cheered the regime and never apologized or felt remorse for its crimes. For example, Evans’s last chapter focuses on Luise Solmitz, a middle-class woman who fell for Hitler’s promise to return Germany to greatness, even though her own husband was classified as Jewish under Nazi law (he was a conservative nationalist, a veteran, and a Christian convert, but his mother was Jewish).

Hitler’s People is an excellent book, because it shows us who the Nazis really were: upper-class and middle-class Germans who faced downward social mobility, feared equality and social progress, and took out their frustrations over Germany’s defeat in World War I on those least responsible for it, Jews and Social Democrats. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement, they supported or fully tolerated its violence. Even after Hitler launched a genocidal war across Europe, they continued to cheer for him. And most of those who survived Nazism’s final defeat were unrepentant for the rest of their days.

Every reader of Evans’s book will encounter a few figures who stick in his or her mind. For some, it will be Goebbels, who has become the template for those who seek to manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. For others, it will be the architect Albert Speer, whose successful myth-making autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, led many to believe that he was “the good Nazi.” Fortunately, Evans debunks such unhistorical nonsense.

The Past Is Never Dead

For me, the most striking chapter is on Karl Brandt, a doctor who drew on his medical knowledge to become a mass murderer in the service of the regime. No one forced him into it. He could have lived a prosperous life without becoming a Nazi, but he chose not to.

Brandt was a product of the German university system, and my only disappointment with Hitler’s People is that its subjects do not include any of the university presidents who oversaw the academic world that helped transform students of medicine into mass murderers. Many of these men would remain respected figures in their fields long after 1945. They do not deserve to have their complicity in the Nazi-era horrors so conveniently forgotten.

Evans writes with the wisdom and anger of a scholar who has spent a lifetime using history to make political points. He disdains the descendants of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who still live on an estate that was a gift from Hitler. His chapter on Papen, who was released from prison in 1949 and lived until 1969, offers a searingly insightful look at political collaboration with evil. And he is no less appalled by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s organization who remained unrepentant until her death in 1999.

Reading Hitler’s People, one cannot help but recognize the parallels to those who are complicit in, or openly profiting from, undermining democracy today. We should all share Evans’s anger. History has already shown us what happens when democracies allow their enemies to weaken them from within. Though we face an onslaught of manipulative propaganda and technologically augmented lies, there is still time to prove Mann right.

• Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Penguin Press, 2024.
  Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, Knopf, 2024.

 

Mark Jones

Writing for PS since 2023

Mark Jones, Assistant Professor of History at University College Dublin, is the author of 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup (Basic Books, 2023).

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Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207j6wy332o

Last October, Palestinian grandmother Ayesha Shtayyeh says a man pointed a gun at her head and told her to leave the place she had called home for 50 years.

She told the BBC the armed threat was the culmination of an increasingly violent campaign of harassment and intimidation that began in 2021, after an illegal settler outpost was established close to her home in the occupied West Bank.

The number of these outposts has risen rapidly in recent years, new BBC analysis shows. There are currently at least 196 across the West Bank, and 29 were set up last year - more than in any previous year.

The outposts - which can be farms, clusters of houses, or even groups of caravans - often lack defined boundaries and are illegal under both Israeli and international law.

But the BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

The BBC has also analysed open source intelligence to examine their proliferation, and has investigated the settler who Ayesha Shtayyeh says threatened her.

Experts say outposts are able to seize large swathes of land more rapidly than settlements, and are increasingly linked to violence and harassment towards Palestinian communities.

• BBC InDepth: Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land under cover of war - they hope permanently

Official figures for the number of outposts do not exist. But BBC Eye reviewed lists of them and their locations gathered by Israeli anti-settlement watchdogs Peace Now and Kerem Navot - as well as the Palestinian Authority, which runs part of the occupied West Bank.

We analysed hundreds of satellite images to verify that outposts had been constructed at these locations and to confirm the year they were set up. The BBC also checked social media posts, Israeli government publications and news sources to corroborate this and to show that outposts were still in use.

Our analysis suggests almost half (89) of the 196 outposts we verified have been built since 2019.

Some of these are linked to growing violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Earlier this year, the British government sanctioned eight extremist settlers for inciting or perpetrating violence against Palestinians. At least six had established, or are living on, illegal outposts.

Responding to our findings in this article, a UK Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement: “We strongly condemn the unprecedented levels of settler violence against the Palestinian community, as shown in the report, and have urged the Israeli authorities to end the culture of impunity and clamp down on those responsible.”

A former commander of the Israeli army in the West Bank, Avi Mizrahi, says most settlers are law-abiding Israeli citizens, but he does admit the existence of outposts makes violence more likely.

“Whenever you put outposts illegally in the area, it brings tensions with the Palestinians… living in the same area,” he says.

One of the extremist settlers sanctioned by the UK was Moshe Sharvit - the man Ayesha says threatened her at gunpoint. Both he and the outpost he set up less than 800m (0.5miles) from Ayesha's home, were also sanctioned by the US government in March. His outpost was described as a “base from which he perpetrates violence against Palestinians”.

“He’s made our life hell,” Ayesha says, who must now live with her son in a town close to Nablus.

Outposts lack any official Israeli planning approval - unlike settlements, which are larger, typically urban, Jewish enclaves built throughout the West Bank, legal under Israeli law.

Both are considered illegal under international law, which forbids moving a civilian population into an occupied territory. But many settlers living in the West Bank claim that, as Jews, they have a religious and historical connection to the land.

In July, the UN’s top court, in a landmark opinion, said Israel should stop all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel rejected the opinion as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided.

Despite outposts having no legal status, there is little evidence that the Israeli government has been trying to prevent their rapid growth in numbers.

The BBC has seen new evidence showing how two organisations with close ties to the Israeli state have provided money and land used to set up new outposts in the West Bank.

One is the World Zionist Organization (WZO), an international body founded more than a century ago and instrumental in the establishment of the state of Israel. It has a Settlement Division - responsible for managing large areas of the land occupied by Israel since 1967. The division is funded entirely by Israeli public funds and describes itself as an “arm of the Israeli state”.

Contracts obtained by Peace Now, and analysed by the BBC, show the Settlement Division has repeatedly allocated land on which outposts have been built. In the contracts, the WZO forbids the building of any structures and says the land should only be used for grazing or farming - but satellite imagery reveals that, in at least four cases, illegal outposts were built on it.

One of these contracts was signed by Zvi Bar Yosef in 2018. He - like Moshe Sharvit - was sanctioned by the UK and US earlier this year for violence and intimidation against Palestinians.

We contacted the WZO to ask if it was aware that multiple tracts of land it had allocated for grazing and farming were being used for the construction of illegal outposts. It did not respond. We also put questions to Zvi Bar Yosef, but received no reply.

The BBC has also uncovered two documents revealing that another key settler organisation - Amana - loaned hundreds of thousands of shekels to help establish outposts.

In one case, the organisation loaned NIS 1,000,000 ($270,000/£205,000) to a settler to build greenhouses on an outpost considered illegal under Israeli law.

Amana was founded in 1978 and has worked closely with the Israeli government to build settlements throughout the West Bank ever since.

But in recent years, there has been growing evidence that Amana also supports outposts.

In a recording from a meeting of executives in 2021, leaked by an activist, Amana’s CEO Ze’ev Hever can be heard stating that: “In the last three years… one operation we have expanded is the herding farm [outposts].”

“Today, the area [they control] is almost twice the size of built settlements.”

This year, the Canadian government included Amana in a round of sanctions against individuals and organisations responsible for “violent and destabilising actions against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank”. The sanctions did not mention outposts.

The BBC contacted Amana to ask why it was providing loans used to establish outposts. It did not respond.

There is also a trend of the Israeli government retroactively legalising outposts - effectively transforming them into settlements. Last year, for example, the government began the process of legalising at least 10 outposts, and granted at least six others full legal status.

In February, Moshe Sharvit - the settler Ayesha Shtayyeh says evicted her from her home - hosted an open day at his outpost, filmed by a local camera crew. Speaking candidly, he laid out just how effective outposts can be for capturing land.

“The biggest regret when we [settlers] built settlements was that we got stuck within the fences and couldn’t expand,” he told the crowd. “The farm is very important, but the most important thing for us is the surrounding area.”

He claimed he now controls about 7,000 dunams (7 sq km) of land - an area greater than many large, urban settlements in the West Bank with populations in the thousands.

Gaining control over large areas, often at the expense of Palestinian communities, is a key goal for some settlers who set up and live on outposts, says Hagit Ofran of Peace Now.

“Settlers who live on the hilltop [outposts] see themselves as ‘protecting lands’ and their daily job is to kick out Palestinians from the area,” she says.

Ayesha says that Moshe Sharvit began a campaign of harassment and intimidation almost as soon as he set up his outpost in late 2021.

When her husband, Nabil, grazed his goats in pastures he had used for decades, Sharvit would quickly arrive in an all-terrain vehicle and he and young settlers would chase the animals away, he says.

“I responded that we’d leave if the government, or police, or judge tells us to,” Nabil says.

“He told me: ‘I’m the government, and I’m the judge, and I’m the police.’”

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The AfD can win on an extremist platform

The results in Saxony and Thuringia show the party does not have to moderate its positions to have electoral success.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-afd-can-win-on-an-extremist-platform

The Thuringia AfD leader, Björn Höcke, relishing his ‘outlaw’ status while sending a defiant eastern message to Berlin

 

 

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has achieved unprecedented results in regional elections in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, both part of former East Germany. The party took around 30 per cent of the vote in each state. In Thuringia, this put the AfD well ahead of any other party. In Saxony, the AfD was a close second behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The result is particularly concerning given the extreme position of the AfD in Thuringia and Saxony. These regional branches of the AfD have been classified as right-wing extremists by German security authorities. The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, uses particularly radical language.

It’s also alarming for German democracy that the AfD has managed to garner significant support while very openly embracing extreme views. Far-right parties in other countries have often had to moderate their rhetoric to achieve electoral success, but the AfD has not, in this case, had to do so.

A rising force

The longstanding taboo in Germany that once rendered far-right positions unacceptable has been eroding for some time. Now this taboo appears to have lost its influence over a third of voters in the east. The threats posed by the AfD to democracy do not seem to be putting them off.

Admittedly, mainstream parties have struggled in Thuringia in recent years, with both the far right and far left having success, especially in areas that struggle economically. There is a sense among some voters in former East German regions that the economic and political system of the unified Germany benefits them less than the rest of the country, which leads to resentment towards mainstream elites.

But while this has likely contributed to the current election result, concerns about crime and immigration also played a key role. Anti-immigrant slogans seem to have been a key mobilising force, particularly for AfD voters. Indeed, voter turnout was very high in these elections—above 70 per cent in both states.

It’s also significant that the AfD gained considerable support among voters under 30, reflecting a wider trend in Europe for younger people, particularly men, to increasingly lean towards far-right positions. The AfD’s strong presence on platforms such as TikTok also seems to be part of the formula.

What next?

State governments hold considerable power over numerous issues that significantly affect the everyday lives of citizens in Germany, including education, which is exclusively determined at the state level. Additionally, state governments participate in federal legislation on matters that affect the regions. The AfD would need a coalition partner both in Thuringia and in Saxony to form a government. Yet all parties running in the elections have committed to avoiding a coalition with the AfD.

Thus all other parties in Thuringia and Saxony face the very challenging task of forming a coalition without the AfD. To achieve this in either Saxony or Thuringia, the electoral arithmetic necessitates unprecedented coalitions between parties with strikingly different ideologies. Whether this will be feasible remains to be seen.

Such a coalition would compel the conservative CDU to work with very left-leaning partners, including the newly formed BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance). It is likely to be extremely challenging for CDU and BSW politicians to find common ground. The BSW, which was formed this year as a splinter group from the Left party, takes a strong stance against immigration. This is in stark contrast to the Left party, which sees immigration much more positively. The latter, however, saw significant losses in both states.

Involving the BSW in a government could have implications for national political discourse, too, particularly as the BSW opposes Germany’s provision of weapons to Ukraine. Thus the AfD and BSW align more closely on certain key policy issues that resonate with voters and it is an open question whether the BSW will continue to rule out working with the AfD.

The successes of the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia will also have immediate ramifications for Germany’s national government and the chancellor, Olaf Scholz. All three of the parties that make up the national government coalition—the social democrats (SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats—suffered losses in these regional elections. The results are likely to exacerbate tensions in Berlin. Questions will be raised about whether the coalition can survive until the federal elections of 2025 and how the three parties can hold together as they try to appeal more to their own core voters.

This first appeared on the Europp blog of the London School of Economics