← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Valley Forge
Thread ID: 17005 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-02-27
2005-02-27 22:36 | User Profile
Does anyone know anything about the NPD? Are they a legitimate dissident group made up of good Germans who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, or are they a Jewish-globalist front group being put forward to give the powers that be in Germany the excuse they need to crack down even further on free expression and civil liberties in Germany?
[url]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050225.wgermany26/BNStory/International/[/url]
Berlin ââ¬â A neo-Nazi plan to disrupt a commemoration ceremony marking 60 years since the end of the Second World War has created unprecedented unity among Germany's three major political parties in a desperate effort to avoid international embarrassment.
The National Democratic Party (NPD), an openly anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler party that German governments have repeatedly tried to ban, has applied to hold a major demonstration on May 8, known as "end-of-war day" in Germany and V-E Day elsewhere.
The march would take thousands of neo-Nazis through Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of the unification of East and West, and past the new Memorial to the Murdered European Jews, an austere Holocaust monument designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman.
The governing and opposition parties put aside deep differences this week and agreed to pass a law by March 11 that would make it easier for police to ban public demonstrations by limiting the right to public assembly.
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Berlin's political and intellectual circles have become consumed with the difficult question of how to prevent the demonstration without violating the German constitution's strong protection of civil liberties, and without offending one or another of the parties.
Such a law could potentially affect other protests, such as the rallies that greeted U.S. President George W. Bush in Mainz on Wednesday. These are the sort of protests that brought the Green Party, part of Germany's governing coalition, to power in the 1990s.
But the embarrassment that a neo-Nazi rally would cause on such a well-observed day has led almost all the major parties, including the Greens and the opposition Christian Democrats, to embrace new restrictions on civil liberties.
"It's about Germany's image abroad," said Hartmut Koschyk, a spokesman for the Christian Democratic Party.
Members of the conservative Christian Democrats are usually deeply opposed to any legislation proposed by Germany's ruling "red-green" coalition of Social Democratic and Green parties.
Only a few weeks ago, Christian Democratic leaders accused the ruling coalition of having created the same economic conditions that brought Hitler to power in 1933.
With 12 per cent of the population unemployed in a stagnant economy, disgruntled Germans in eastern regions recently voted for extremist parties in unprecedented numbers, leading the NPD to win seats in a provincial election last fall. This neo-Nazi revival, while limited in scope and widely condemned throughout German society, has caught political leaders off guard.
The NPD has embarrassed Germans before, such as three years ago when thousands of skinheads marched in front of Berlin's largest synagogue.
Udo Voigt, who leads the NPD and is the son of a Nazi SA officer, recently courted arrest by expressing admiration for Hitler. Last month, he said of the new Holocaust memorial, which includes a field of heavy black slabs: "We would like to thank them for building the foundation for the chancellery of the new German Reich."
The party had previously been dismissed as a fringe phenomenon. Now, with the spectre of a resurgent NPD becoming part of Germany's public face, there are renewed moves to have the party outlawed under a German constitutional clause that bans the Nazi party.
Governments have repeatedly tried to have the NPD banned since it was formed in the 1960s, out of the ashes of the old National Socialist (Nazi) Party.
The most recent attempt to prove the party's Nazi status failed when courts ruled in 2003 that the government's evidence was inadmissible; it had been gathered using spies working within the party.
Germans are now left with the tricky question of how to use laws to prevent the May 8 demonstration.
The NPD has been able to make its demonstrations legal by carefully crafting its applications so they don't violate Germany's 10-year-old law against Holocaust denial. Last week, the governing parties proposed an expansion of that law that would also ban public demonstrations that included the "playing down of" the significance of the Holocaust and other Nazi human-rights atrocities. That, they argued, would render illegal any NPD demonstration, especially one held near the Holocaust memorial.
But legal advisers said that this language would be unconstitutional, as it would outlaw all sorts of rude but commonplace behaviour.
"We can't make it a crime to compare Bush and Hitler, as many people tend to do," Dieter Wiefelspütz, a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, said in an interview yesterday.
"It's a ridiculous comparison, but people should have the right to make it. Or when someone says 'the Nazi era had its good sides.' That can't be criminal.
"So we changed the wording to 'toleration or glorification of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis.' It's more precise and it carries legal weight."
The parties are to debate the proposed law on March 7. It would have to be passed by the legislature by March 11, and by the German Senate by March 18, if it is to be used to stop the NPD demonstration.
Jorg Fischer, a former neo-Nazi leader who recanted and recently published a book about efforts to outlaw the movement, said yesterday that efforts to ban the demonstration are only likely to aggravate the problem.
"The restriction of right of assembly won't just affect neo-Nazis, it'll affect all democratic gatherings," he said. "It's a massive reduction of democratic rights. That's exactly what the neo-Nazis want, a weaker democracy."
With a report from Naomi Buck
2005-02-27 22:55 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Valley Forge]Does anyone know anything about the NPD? Are they a legitimate dissident group made up of good Germans who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, or are they a Jewish-globalist front group being put forward to give the powers that be in Germany the excuse they need to crack down even further on free expression and civil liberties in Germany?
[url]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050225.wgermany26/BNStory/International/[/url] [/QUOTE]Can't say I do really. I suppose you might check the nordish portal.
I'd guess probably a mixture. Did you all hear about the recent discovery during court proceedings to outlaw the party, that several of its top officers were really government agents? Including the ones making the most inflammatory statements? I know we had a thread on it.