Date: 27/05/19 Rainer Zitelmann, Tichys Einblick
The Greens have long been defining the cultural and political agenda in Germany. The more the other parties have been currying favour with them, the stronger the Green Party has become: voters now choose the original, not the imitators.
“On many issues today, the Greens are setting the direction, then the SPD follows and finally the Christian Democrats follow, lagging behind with a clear delaying effect … The Green Party’s impact goes far beyond their involvement at state government level and their successes documented in elections. More importantly, the Green Party succeeds time and time again in determining the political agenda and assuming opinion leadership in public debate. This can only happen, however, because they have an above-average number of sympathizers in the media and because the ranks of their natural challengers, i.e. the Christian Democrats (CDU), have softened and leading CDU politicians have adopted key positions of the Greens.”
I wrote these sentences not one or two years ago, but in 1995, 24 years ago (!), in my book “Where is our Republic drifting?” In this book, I tried to predict longer-term trajectories of political developments in the German Federal Republic. My findings from 1995 show that the developments that have led to the election success of 20.7 percent for the Green Party yesterday is the result of long developments. Of course, this result was not straightforward – in between the Green Party was sometimes so weak that some already predicted its demise.
People choose the original and not the copy
In response to the European elections we will see the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) claiming that they now need to do more about climate change. This, they will claim, is the real lesson of the European elections. This, of course, is rather absurd: It’s as if someone who took the wrong direction thinks he has to go faster now to reach the finish.
For years, both CDU/CSU and SPD have been implementing the Greens’ manifesto: shutting down nuclear power plants, phasing out coal, transforming Germany’s energy sector into a command and control economy, etc. Recently, they have begun to restructure the automotive industry in line with a planned economy – so-called “fleet targets” are imposed throughout the EU, defining which cars may be produced and which not. This strategy of cozying up to the Greens and taking over their key agenda, however, has not led to the weakening but to the strengthening of the Green Party: after all, voters prefer to pick the original, rather than the copy.
It’s never enough
The logic of the Green Party, on the other hand, is always: “It’s never enough”. Once you shut down all nuclear power plants coal-fired power plants become the next target. Like a doomsday sect, the imminent end of the world is being propagated. And despite the set phrase that “fear is not a good guide in politics” (which is the standard mantra in the immigration debate), scare-mongering about the end of the world is now their dominant sensation. It’s just like the “social justice” mantra which the Greens also propagate now: no matter what’s been done, it’s never enough and it always has to be much more and more radical.
The mainstream media, especially television, have long been in green hands, which we know from surveys about the party affinity of journalists. In the meantime, however, the Greens are also succeeding in cleverly using social media, as the video by Rezo and the initiative by 70 Youtubers recently showed.
The self-destruction of the economy
Germany’s social institutions have long been dominated by champions of the Greens – especially news media and education institutions, but also the main churches. That 36 percent of first-time voters meanwhile voted for the Green Party (in this electoral group the CDU is only two percentage points ahead of the left-wing comedy PARTY) is also a consequence of the fact that in schools green doctrines are propagated as certainties of modern school education.
This, however, only works because Germany’s industry and business community is opportunistic and does not oppose the green Zeitgeist. Big business has adapted cunningly, as it has always done. I still remember how Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche disguised himself as green campaigner to curry favour with the Green Party at their party conference. Or how VW CEO Herbert Diess explained how he intends to transform Volkswagen into a green company.
In the United States, there are still free marketeers among successful businesses and entrepreneurs who are opposed to the left-wing takeover in universities and the news media, especially by supporting libertarian and conservative think tanks. In Germany, there is hardly any of this: If you look at topics and programmes of the liberal Friedrich Naumann Foundation, you will realise that the dominant dogma is not challenged by anything appealing.
Read the full story in English here.
Read the original in German here.
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Seriously, I am in shock about how much americans seem to be literally OBSESSED with calling everyone and everything which doesn’t fit into their own worldview “socualism” and communism”, like that would explain everything away. This is simply ridiculous. The german Greens’ power grab has NOTHING AT ALL to do with socialism and/or communism, but with pure, unfettled FASCISM, i.e. with the oppression of individual requirements and desires for the good of a super-hierarchic, super-oppressive conservative state. No one – as in NO ONE – in and around the Greens or other environmental activist groups has ANY connection with a left/socialist or communist party in Germany WHAT-SO-EVER. Quite the contrary: Our conservative parties CDU and CSU – who happen to be senior partners in the actual german government and, hence, are providing the actual german chancellor Angela Merkel – are actually cosing up with the Greens and are wooing them at any corner, because they understand that the numbers dictate that only the Greens will supply the CDU/CSU the votes for a majority in the German parliament, the Bundestag, after the 2021 elections, which is neccessary for a coalition to provide the german government.
Thr roots of most of the Greens are deep red, and brown/black.
Communism and facism aren’t a contradiction.
Naive. They support the Greens for the votes and nothing more and the goal remains the same. They’re collecting minority groups solely for the numbers. They’ll pander to any group as long as they control the coalition and the end result is always the same. I can’t speak for the Americans but I think their “obsession” is accurate. Watching Europe fall apart under the auspices of the EU should be a huge clue. But then again, opinions are like ass holes.
Most Americans don’t really draw a line between fascism and communism. We see them both as the bane of free people because the government rules your life. So we have a tendency to just call it communism or socialism because the Democrats in our country have done a good job convincing people (in our country) that fascism is somehow a problem they oppose. To them, fascism and communism are on a right-left spectrum… they don’t consider the fact that most American “conservatives” are pretty strongly anti-government in general. Which means that we oppose them both and would prefer less government not more.
Then you agree it is not truly about environmentalism. The true goal is the accumulation of dominant political power by a few over the many. That is socialism/neo-Marxism/fascism.
They are all just different flavors of the same poison to destroy the individual, the free mind and thus the free-person.
The line between communism and fascism is virtually invisible. The reason they are permanently at each other’s throats as that they are battling for the same hearts and minds. Fascism is not a philosophy of the right; its aims are the same as the Marxists. The only difference is that it doesn’t pretend that it is giving power to “the people”.
I suggest you read “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg. It’s an eye-opener.
Michael, living in Germany now after spending 16 years in foreign countries including 6 years in the US it appears to me that the words left, right, socialism, communism, democratic, republican, liberal have lost their meaning because they resemble hollow shells, a disguise to gain power for the power sake and the money associated with it.
Who really stands in these days for freedom, tolerance (live and let live)? Every value we might have had as a society seems to be up for sell to the highest bidder.
It is depressing and yes we are on the path to the next dictatorship not only in Germany but in many other Western countries.
And it is not driven by ordinary people but by the „elites“
Agreed.
Sorry Michael, you are wrong,
f.e. Trittin is coming out of the KPD.
further:
German source
The grens have red/black roots thats why they are often called watermelons.
The origin of the German green party was a mix of lefties, righties, hippies, bourgeois anti nuclear folks and so on. Trittin may have been part of the aforementioned, but he is now approaching retirement age. During his active years he never put any left wing policies in force. The politics of the current green party are not in any way left wing either, neither in their written programme, much less in their actual policies.
To Americans: In European terms, “left wing” means you have to at least to some degree be concerned in social issues.
– “Social democrat” means you advocate a strong welfare state and strong workers right in the framework of a democracy and a capitalist economy.
– “Socialist” means you advocate collectivisation of the economy, that is the majority of firms must be state owned or run as a co-operative.
– “Communist” means you thrive to overthrow capitalism and create a paradise where everyone is free and any work is voluntary. 🙂
The greens are none of the above.
The world is changing and it is Nationalist parties that are on the rise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/trump-elections-india-australia.html
European Slaughter of Indigenous Americans May Have Cooled the Planet
The Europeans killed so many indigenous Americans during the 16th century — through warfare and by causing disease and famine — that it actually cooled the planet during the Little Ice Age, a new study suggests
https://www.livescience.com/64723-great-dying-little-ice-age.html
Another article in the Post-Modernist mode to demonize Patriarchy (white and European).. Meh
The Germans won’t elect an alpha male because they remember Hitler.
As we all appreciate, in 1989 a popular uprising took down the Berlin Wall and then Communist Governments.
In a relatively short time, control freaks could no longer promote socialism/communism to make a living.
Realizing the opportunity, the control mob shifted over to the environmental movement and has been remarkably successful.
In the early 1990s, the Foundation For Economic Freedom (FEE) published an article on the transition, including names. Unfortunately I’ve lost my copy.
I’ll check the FEE archive to see if it can be found.
It is an accurate observation that there is “never enough” for the Watermelons.
Neo-Marxist Checklist to eliminating the Western style democratic capitalism:
✔︎ Disguise neo-Marxism as an environmental movement from the moral high ground
✔︎ Shut down the nuclear plants,
✔︎ then move-on to eliminating the coal plants,
🔲 then move to natural gas plants,
🔲 then work on dam removal to eleiminate hydropower.
🔲 finally those bird choppers will have to come down too.
🔲 then those land hogging solar panels.
– Western civilization and capitalism destroyed. But a lot of elites gets rich along the way and secure their dominant position in wealth along the way to a new era of Marxist 2-class feudalism.
The modern environmental movement was born in 19th Century German philosophy, which was fundamentally rooted in myths of Eden. This is a very powerful myth for humans because it is probably anchored in our genetic make-up. Most cultures around the world have Eden myths. In all of them, humans are banished from paradise by discovering knowledge and rational thought; becoming self-aware, which then conflicted with our instinctive, natural nature.
The inevitable conclusions drawn from a belief in the Eden Myth will be a reverence for ‘nature’ and a distrust or even hatred of rational thought (the crime that separated us from paradise). Joni Mitchel captured this fundamental idea poetically in her song ‘Woodstock’: “We are stardust, we are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
Both the Third Reich and socialism are products of this philosophy, each striving to return us to their own version of the Garden. The Third Reich took an aggressive approach in it’s attempt to return to the garden. It simply tried to destroy anything that was deemed to be a threat to a return to their imagined paradise, which included the very urban, rational Jewish population and the rest of Western Europe.
Socialism is just a little more subtle, patently winning over groups and institutions with their version of paradise, but it is none-the-less rooted in a belief that a return to Eden is possible and worth the effort.
The irony in all of this is that those seeking a return to Eden have produced the opposite 100% of the time. Environmental degradation is far worse under socialism, as are the people. On the other hand, rational Western thought, including capitalism, continue to bring humanity and the world a little closer to paradise, with ever improving management of natural resources, nature preserves, a reduction in poverty and (thanks to increasing CO2) a strengthening of the entire Earth’s biosphere.
In the most fundamental terms, this is a battle between a philosophy that seeks to suppress rational thought in pursuit of a return to the natural order of the Garden of Eden, and a philosophy that attempts to embrace rational thought and human intelligence to create a new Eden of our own making. Both philosophies have their charm, as was depicted in the classic Star Trek episode ‘The Way to Eden’. Trying to get back to Eden, however, leads to disaster in the TV show and in real life.
The Nazis were born of the ultra green movement. They loved nature and animals, but hated humans. Hitler was a vegan. He loved his dog more than Eva Braun.
Like the Nazis and totalitarian regimes in general, as they seized ever more power, the rhetoric became ever more hard-line and extreme until eventually the entire social fabric collapses in a cauldron of paranoia. We see the greenies coming out with ever more crazy stuff.
Here in Australia, the Labor opposition were so certain they were going to romp in that they were trying to outdo the greens on being extreme green. It was the climate election-an election framed by (pagan religious) belief. We were even asked to sacrifice our entire economy, inheritances and standards of living without being told of the cost. We were simply expected to swallow the Kool aid as though it were medicine for the planet.
Although the election results defied the polls, it is still disturbing that 48.2% of the voters swallowed the suicide pill. With a new batch of brainwashed children set to vote next election and swarms more behind them, with older non-brainwashed people dropping off the perch, we will eventually find ourselves voting for national suicide .
We need to deprogram children at schools to bypass the teachers that have been plugging their private Marxist agenda (which is illegal) to impressionable children.
I have a program in mind, but have no educational credentials to get in to schools. If WUWT readers have the connections in Australia, please contact me.
“The Nazis were born of the ultra green movement.” ……..nope….you must never have heard about the Treaty of Versailles.
Yes, ToV set the economic conditions in place for Germany’s Weimar Republic to fail. But fascism’s rise then came out of much deeper, more sinister motives already present in many Germans by the end of 19th Century.
The German national socialist movement led by AH, was inspired directly out of Italy’s national fascists led by Mussolini. AH modeled a lot what he did in his early years and in his book Mein Kampf after what Mussolini had “accomplished” in Italy to stop Italian communists from uniting the Italian worker and peasants. Both had totalitarian ideas, but different methods of uniting the people. But AH capitalized on a mucher deeper historic virulent racism held by many Germans against Jews.
But Germany’s Nazis did not “come out of the ToV”. Everything for that was already there before WW1.
Understand your history.
Good, informative comment. But what motivates an intelligent, resourceful group like the Germans to abandon reality in pursuit of a fantasy?
The promise of heaven and the fear of hell. It’s the exact same reason we have more and more windmills and fewer nuclear reactors. A rational, well educated people would immediately see the folly in windmills, but an emotional people, persuaded to believe that fossil fuels and nuclear energy lead to hell on Earth, will abandon reason and rational thought.
The German people were persuaded with fear, and a very heavy dose of victimhood; the same recipe the Greens still use today.
You should see the German media of the last couple of years, and esp. the last 6 months or so. “Climate change” seems their only issue, it’s mentioned almost in any programme and painted as imminent doomsday if “we don’t act now”. It’s like watching televengelists, just for a different religion. This is having an effect. People trust the media too much.
Germany has had 50 years of US subsidized military security. They will be able to “live off of” the $800 Billion they’ve saved for some time…and they are an intelligent and industrious people.
Some Predictions:
• The AMO has peaked and the northern Atlantic SST’s have started an entirely predictable cooling trend…which will continue for another 50 – 80 years.
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/atlantic-multi-decadal-oscillation-amo
• Climate Change will be blamed for the cooling…and…The Greens will continue killing their country with renewables for 20 years into the cooling trend.
• Millions of germans could suffer severely (many dying) in the bitter winters of the coming decades especially if Russia chooses to limit natural gas supplies. Putin (or his successors) will be able to command ruinous prices.
• Their beloved forests will suffer from desperate poachers trying to stay alive.
• Fourth Reich?
It’s actually quite simple.
Decades of post-war guilt cultivation and the accumulation of too much money in saving accounts.
Result, agile do-gooders lead the dance while there’s free money left around as the population ages.
So what’s the wakeup call and for whom? Economics is a foreign concept outside of UK, Nederlands, Austria and USA and UK is doing its best to unlearn it. Former colonies of Australia and New Zealand never really cottoned onto this evonomics thing and Canada has caught the marxy sparxy flu. Im hoping India will show us the way forward.
The Germans are driven by their intense personal guilt for WWII and the Holocaust. They believe that they should die and disappear from history as a condign punishment for their own actions. That is why they are going green. That is why their fertility rates have dropped way below replacement. The gross rate is is around 1.5, but the children that are being born are Muslims not Germans. As David Goldman (Spengler) wrote: In the 22nd Century, German will only be spoken in hell.
At the end of WWII the Allies examined a plan for the reconstruction of Germany called the Morgenthau Plan. One version of the plan was “eliminating the warmaking industries in the Ruhr and the Saar… looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.” The plan never was put into effect, largely because the Russians started the cold war.
The irony is that the Greens are taking steps to implement the Morgenthau plan. I say good luck to them.
Since Germany is driving the EU, and since I think your assessment is largely correct, England should Brexit without delay. It won’t take long to clean up afterwards.
The Eu is a multi-dimensional cluster farrago. Sauve Qui Peut!
Yes, Hard Brexit ASAP.
I would think German voters would dump the Greens as soon as the rolling blackouts start, which should be any day.
Two memories of my first visit to Germany about 40 years ago. Many cars with “Atomkraft Nein Danke” stickers. Second very tight security due to Baader-Meinhof activity. Apart a different source of home grown terrorism not a lot has changed.