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

[Vesper 30,127]

 

[Vesper 30,127]

 

[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 30,127]

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 17,306]

 

[Vesper 30,127]

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.
 

[Vesper 30,127]

10 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

'they claim a divine right to commit horrific acts'

pretty much sums it up

[Vesper 30,127]

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 30,127]

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 30,127]

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