Podcast #250: Israel: Germany’s Reason of State
Iona Italia talks to Gerfried Ambrosch about pro-Israel feeling on the German Left, antisemitism among Muslim immigrants and why Israel’s safety is “Germany’s reason of state.”
Introduction: My guest today is Gerfried Ambrosch. Gerfried is an independent writer and scholar based in Munich, who focuses on free speech and culture war issues. He is also a musician and is the author of The Poetry of Punk: The Meaning Behind Punk Rock and Hardcore Lyrics. As a former radical leftist involved in underground music scenes, Gerfried possesses an intimate knowledge of far-left subcultures. I talked to him about the broader context of his article, “The German Left’s Jewish Dilemma,” which was published in Quillette on 25 July 2024 and which is also available in an audio version, narrated by me. We discussed the surprising breadth of pro-Israel feeling among German leftists, the growing problem of antisemitism among Muslim immigrants in Germany and the reasons why so many German politicians describe Israel’s safety as “Germany’s reason of state.”
Gerfried Ambrosch
Iona Italia: So Gerfried, when did you decide to write this article and what was it specifically that initially prompted you to start thinking about that?
Gerfried Ambrosch: It was earlier in the summer, I think, and there were obviously discussions and debates going on in my social circles that just seemed for the most part misinformed and very lopsided. And so I thought, given my background, which I mentioned in the piece, coming from the underground punk scene and having that cultural background as well, I thought it would be interesting for readers outside of Germany, who might not know what’s going on here and that the German left actually has this dilemma, which I use as the title for the article, when it comes to Israel and the Jewish people, given our history. I say “our history,” I don’t think I clarified this in the piece, because I’m actually Austrian, so technically not German. But, of course, Austria was part of the Third Reich pretty much from … well, not quite from the start, but the so-called invasion was very … not a single shot was fired and a quarter million people welcomed Hitler in Vienna. We were in this, but, of course, there’s a slight difference in terms of how historically we have dealt with it because after the war, when the Third Reich fell apart, we could just say, “Well, we were the first victim of Nazism”—forgetting that Hitler was Austrian. So it’s our history and I live in Germany now, even though I’m in Austria at this moment. So, I just thought this would be interesting for people, to catch a glimpse of the debate that’s going on within the Left and progressive circles in Germany.
II: So, you said that you first had a sense that German attitudes towards Israel were different from what you had been expecting when you were touring with your punk band in the early 2000s. Do you want to talk a bit about that experience: what you were expecting, what you’d encountered before and what was surprising to you when you arrived?
GA: Right. So, politically, I guess what you have to know about the punk scene, it’s not one culture. It’s not a monolith by any means. It’s very Balkanised and it has been for decades. The political circles I was socialised in, within the punk scene, were very much of the anti-imperialist left, far left, radical anarchist-leaning. And part of that was always that you would view Israel as just an extension of the West and as an alien entity in the Muslim world because they were anti-Western and were my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
But when we first started touring with the band and we first got to Germany, especially, interestingly, Eastern Germany, you would find a very different attitude. The mindset there, especially among anti-fascists, was that to be an anti-fascist, you had to support Israel because of course Israel is a sanctuary for Jews and Jews were the Germans’ main victim group. So you would show solidarity with Israel and that was very alien to us because we had this anti-American mindset to begin with. And then, yeah, some of it was very radical. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Anti-Deutsche Bewegung, the anti-German movement on the left. That was actually a big deal back then. They just came up in the late 90s. This is a oversimplified depiction of what was going on, but you had the anti-imperialist Left and you had the anti-German Left in Germany. So basically, and again, I’m breaking this down to the basics here because there is a whole substrata of complex things going on there, but what you had was these people who came out [saying], “What the Left should be doing, mainly in Germany, is criticise Germany and criticise German history.” Even though they were communists, radical communists, they would side with America, the US in conflicts. They would side with the West and especially Israel. They had this one slogan, which was “Israel bis zum Kommunismus,” Israel until Communism, which goes with this whole idea of abolishing nation states, but Israel last, which I mentioned in the piece. This was this radical view. Quite interesting. So they would make a point of wearing Nike shoes, for instance, present themselves as very non-leftist, not meeting the cliché, and being very supportive of Israel. And the problem there—and that was our main criticism back then actually—was that they almost created this sense of inherited collective guilt, which was very similar to the collective guilt of slavery that you would find in the US, this white guilt thing.
That was weird to us, but looking back on it, they made some pretty strong points. And there was already an antisemitic, anti-Israel movement on the way 20 odd years ago, very often coming from Muslim immigrants. So there was already a problem there. I remember there was this one incident in Berlin where a group of anti-imperialist leftists, most of them Muslim, would basically storm a cafe and shut Jews out and things like that. So there was already a problem, and they noticed it, whereas, looking back, our side of the debate back then was quite naive about that.
II: So you were pro-immigrants, and you didn’t realise that this was a major problem, a major strain among German immigrants or when you say you were naive ...
GA: No, we had no idea. You have to understand … I write about this in a different Quillette piece from four years ago. You have to understand the radical mindset, which is very much utopian. And there isn’t a problem that you can’t theorise away or that won’t be solved. Everything in the end will be solved by the great revolution, right? That’s the mindset: the cant ... those are just minor details. “They might be antisemitic. They’ll change,” that kind of thing.
Gerfried Ambrosch
II: Yeah, I’ve been reading a little bit about the history of this shift in Germany in Paul Berman’s book Power and the Idealists. Are you familiar with that book?
GA: I haven’t read it; I have heard of it.
II: He talks about Joschka Fischer as his example of someone who was initially very strongly involved in the radical German Left. He was one of the generation of 1968 and he had shifted his views about Palestine in particular. At first, he had thought of the Palestinian cause as being one more anti-fascist cause, righteous cause of an uprising against a more powerful imperialist aggressor, particularly after the wars in which Israel ended up with more territory than before, in which Israel gained land. But two events really changed his view and changed the view of quite a lot of people on the German left, including a number of people who later became part of the German Green Party. And those were first the massacre at the Munich Olympics in ’72, I think, and then the events in Ethiopia, in Entebbe. (I might be pronouncing that wrong.) When an Air France plane was hijacked, I think it was 1975 or 1976 [1976], in the mid-70s, by a German leftist group who were in solidarity with the PLO. And when the plane landed on the tarmac, they separated the passengers into Jews and non-Jews and wanted to kill the Jews. Actually, there was a military action by Israel. The hostages were rescued.
One of the casualties was actually Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, who became a fallen war hero in the Entebbe thing.
And those two events opened his eyes to the antisemitic strain within the Palestinian liberation movement. And that made him shift over to become a moderate, a supporter of NATO, a supporter of Israel, and then, of course, later foreign secretary and part of the government.
GA: Right, yeah, he did quite a 180 on that. It’s always good when people are capable of changing their minds, especially coming out of such a radical movement. And he was throwing stones at police and things like that. There’s footage of all kinds, or at least stories about all kinds of misbehaviour. But he turned around and that was really something that was symbolic of a shift in German politics where you had to, once Israel was established, you had to come to terms and grapple with your own past and what that meant for Germany. And that created this very special situation that we find ourselves in here, which, especially since October 7th, has been, in my opinion, quite a blessing because the debate here compared to … I have a lot of friends in the UK, for instance, where it’s just pro-Palestine all the way not even thinking about the implications and the consequences or what caused the war in Gaza.
II: You mean on the left? You mean among leftists?
GA: On the left, especially. I think it’s even broader than that, it seems. Even ordinary people who are not necessarily far left, but left of centre, will be very pro-Palestine. Whereas here, you have this much more nuanced way of talking about it. And it’s very different. Even the far left—or especially the far left, a huge part of it anyway—is very pro-Israel. They don’t condone everything Israel does. That’s a given. You can still criticise policies and methods and strategies. But generally, you have this pro-Israel strand on the left and it’s quite refreshing because I’m very immersed in the debate, in the Anglosphere as well. And it’s like, “Okay, here I can go to a concert venue. Here, I can go to pretty much anywhere and even leftist or progressive places and you won’t see any Palestinian flags because it’s now been associated with an antisemitic mindset.
We had some campus protests, but they were small, and they were ended by police quite quickly. I live in Munich and there was a very small one there as well, which basically wasn’t on campus, but just off campus, like a public square, just a couple of tents. And even there, amidst all the Palestinian flags and all that, they had one huge banner that said, “Stop Antisemitism.” It’s probably lip service, but they had to have it to even be able to maintain the camp, which a couple of weeks ago was actually burned down by someone. They caught the guy … If I remember correctly, the motive was more to do with an anti-immigrant motive, because a lot of people there were Middle Eastern or at least Middle Eastern-looking.
II: After 7th of October, there was a vote to condemn Hamas’s actions in the Australian Parliament and the Green Party en masse got up and walked out because they refused to condemn [them]. This was immediately after the Hamas attacks. I can’t imagine that happening in the German parliament.
GA: Impossible, there is a pretty broad consensus across all parties that you at least acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and defend itself and go after the attackers. I mean, that’s part of defence, isn’t it? So no, I couldn’t imagine that. And I think that would pretty much end anyone’s political career in parliament here.
II: Can you explain to people what you understand by the phrase, which I’ve heard Olaf Scholz and other people use, that “Israel ist Deutschlands Staatsräson,” Israel is Germany’s reason of state. What do they mean by that precisely? It’s an odd turn of phrase.
GA: It is, isn’t it? Yeah. Scholz said it after October 7th, but he was not the first to say it. Angela Merkel actually said it a couple years back, I think around 2014. She coined the phrase, as it were. And what it means is that due to Germany’s historic guilt towards the Jewish people, the Jewish state and its safety is our business as a nation. We have to be supportive of it and help it defend itself. And it’s a reason of state: the phrase just means that it goes deeper than mere policy. It’s really deeply embedded in the German democracy as a whole, because you can’t think Germany unless you also think Auschwitz, you also think Dachau and all these places and what happened there. So it’s a way of dealing with the trauma and the guilt in a way that’s productive, in a way that helps Israel, the only Jewish-majority state in the world, survive. That would be my interpretation of it. It just goes really with the German constitution and it’s very deep.
II: I’m always quite concerned … one thing that does concern me in the pro-Israel and pro-Jewish policy within Germany is the free speech implications. I think Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. It’s illegal to say quite a lot of things in Germany. And I think this is a mistake because it means that people saying those kinds of things are driven away from respectable … well, they’re already on the fringes of respectable circles, but they’re driven away from saying this in any context in which they could be persuaded out of it. And also, I generally think it’s good to have the information. It’s good to know what people are thinking. You can’t stop them from thinking it by preventing them from saying it, therefore, it’s better to allow them to say it so you can tackle that, know the extent of the problem and tackle it. That would be my view. How do you feel about that kind of legislation yourself?
GA: It’s a tricky one because, as you know, I’m very much in favour of free speech, verging on free speech absolutism. And what you just said would be an argument for that, which I think has a lot of value and is really valid. When it comes to Holocaust denial, it’s a tool for German democracy to suppress—I mean, that’s what it is, that’s what they’re doing—to suppress tendencies that would set Germany back, that would interfere with the healing process that’s still going on. I feel that it’s a very … and it’s not easy to violate either. It’s not like you say something among friends or even on social media. They have to establish proper cause and for it to meet certain standards. And German bureaucracy is obviously notoriously very complex. So there’s all kinds of checks and balances in there to still uphold the value of free speech and free expression without also allowing something like that to fester and come up again.
But, of course, in certain subcultures, far-right subcultures that still exist in Germany, especially in Eastern Germany, that’s still going on. People will say it. And they’ve come up with all kinds of cunning tricks and methods to say it without saying it, if that makes sense. Another thing that’s against the law is showing or portraying symbols of national socialism. But of course, a lot of these people on the far right marching, those anti-democratic forces—especially again, unfortunately, in Eastern Germany—marching, they have Hitler tattoos, they have swastika tattoos. They just put band-aids over it. So everybody knows they’re Nazis and what they’re doing, but they’re following certain speech codes, and they know exactly what they can show. They have their little codes and German law and legislation, they’re always one step behind anyway, which is quite interesting because they’re coming up with the number codes like the 88 for Heil Hitler and things like that.
It’s quite interesting to see and these groups are under observation and if they’re a party, obviously, there are always people trying to ban those parties. But that’s very difficult, because German democratic law just doesn’t allow you—again, checks and balances, again coming from our history—doesn’t allow you to just ban a party. So they’d have to really make a case, really establish these offences that might lead to the party being banned or a protest being banned or whatever it is.
II: How connected is the party Alternative für Deutschland with the far-right neo-Nazi groups? I don’t know too much about that party actually. Can you tell me more about the AfD?
GA: It’s quite interesting because back in 2014, when they started out, they were a centre-right, classically liberal, economically liberal party, socially conservative. So they were trying to span this spectrum of being conservative and liberal at the same time, which is not impossible, it’s not a contradiction in terms, but it’s a difficult thing to pull off. But, of course, what happened was that the far-right fringe of the party, which grew quite quickly, took over the party more or less. And now you have some very dodgy people running the show and if you follow the news in Germany at all, every couple of weeks, there’s some scandal involving some neo-Nazi activity of someone. Their youth organisation has already been officially labelled as far-right extremists. That’s their youth organisation, but, of course, that doesn’t really reflect back onto the main party because they’re much more careful in what they’re doing.
Following the discourse about the AfD outside of Germany, I think a lot of people make the mistake of not taking into account the history and what saying certain things means in the historical context of Germany. They’re not just another right-of-centre party. In my opinion—and I share that opinion with a lot of observers—there’s something pretty sinister going on there. It’s difficult to pinpoint but there’s always these little things popping up where you know someone like Bernd Höcke [of the AfD] uses a Nazi slogan. He’s a historian, I think, at least he studied history to some extent and so he knows, right? But then he gets off by saying, “I didn’t know.” So it’s trying to push those boundaries. They’re trying to provoke a reaction and that really benefits them.
And of course the problem with those parties in general is that a lot of the issues that they have made their main concern and that they’re identified with were neglected by the rest of the political spectrum for too long. And the issue of immigration, I don’t know if you heard about the recent knife attack, mass stabbing just a couple of days ago in Solingen, Germany. Three people died. [The attacker was a] Syrian immigrant with an Islamist motive. And nobody … everybody’s just shying away from calling a spade a spade and saying, “There is a problem. There’s a problem.” And these people are saying that there’s a problem. Of course, ordinary people see that there’s a problem. So, who are they going to vote for? But by voting for the AFD, they’re buying a whole package of things that they might not want and that might be dangerous for democracy.
II: Yeah, absolutely. I’m surprised that it’s the opposite of what I see happening with Giorgia Meloni’s party and also with Marine Le Pen. As far as I can tell, Marine Le Pen has quite successfully denazified her party. Giorgia Meloni has also proven to be far less far right than I was fearing that she would be. I don’t support either of those parties, but in both cases, they are more paper-tigerish than I thought—but the AFD does seem very different in that regard.
John Lloyd
GA: Yes. Part of the reason also is that they have absorbed a lot of the far-right extremist underground groups that have been around for decades—again, especially in Eastern Germany. And now you see the same people who used to march for the NPD, for instance, or NDP, the so-called National Democratic Party. Parties with “democratic” in their names, it’s always weird. You see the same people now marching for the AfD and the tattoos I mentioned earlier, of the swastikas and the portraits of Hitler and Himmler and Göring and all those people, these people are now in the AfD. They might not be front benchers, but they’re there and there are a lot of conspiracy theorists and so forth. You have that in other parties as well. But I think there’s a difference and the difference again comes from our special situation in Germany, from our history and all that.
The AfD will be antisemitic once in a while, but by and large, they’re actually pro-Israel as well, which is quite interesting. So in their case, obviously, they’re viewing Israel as a bulwark against Islamisation, which in a way it is. It’s out there, but that obviously makes things even more complicated because you have people on the far left and people on the far right agreeing on that for different reasons. But of course, the AfD doesn’t want to hear about German guilt or anything like that whatsoever. They will deny that. There’s this—I forget who it was—one of the AfD elders who caused a scandal for downplaying the Third Reich, calling it … I think he said, “Fliegenschiss,” fly crap or whatever you want to … it’s difficult to translate.
II: Yeah. I was going to say “chicken shit,” but that means something different. Yeah, [they meant that] it’s trivial.
GA: It means something different, yeah. A minor stain on the thousand-year German history, right, causing one of, if not the worst war in history, the Holocaust. It’s not minor. And a lot of people, most people in Germany acknowledge that … and to bring it back to the current situation with Israel, to a lot of people left and right and also far left, it’s quite clear that Israel’s safety is connected to that history and that we have to support it.
II: Let’s talk a little bit about the situation with immigration. So you were talking in the article about marches that were very immigrant-heavy, looking at the demographic, and even marches where men and women were marching separately in order to conform to Islamic teachings about separation of men and women. So they were marching on these pro-Palestine marches—pro-Palestine, anti-Israel marches—sex-segregated, with very large groups of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Talk a bit more about that situation and what’s been happening there and how the government has responded, how that’s being covered in the German press, etc.
GA: Hmm. The first such protest happened, I believe, in November last year and it was 3,000 strong in Essen, Germany, I believe it was. And so 3,000 mostly, if not exclusively Muslim protesters were marching in support of Palestine and shouting all kinds of things, including the infamous “from the river to the sea” slogan and all that.
But they were also, and that was the interesting thing … they used these marches to also protest for a caliphate. So they had this very, very blunt Islamist agenda that they were marching for. And as you mentioned, the marches were sex-segregated, which again is a sign of not the most liberal of mindsets, I would say. So that’s quite shocking. The antisemitism there was just palpably, was just really, really strong. Basically, it made clear to a wider public what observers off the scene already knew: that there is a big antisemitism problem in Muslim communities in Germany.
And those communities have been growing steadily and by quite a lot over recent years. And so there was obviously a problem there. It was very anti-Israel, and of course, being immigrants or the children of immigrants being socialised in these immigrant communities that are very secluded for the most part. And not necessarily, not even, that radical on the surface, but you start asking questions like, “Yeah, of course we want Israel abolished, right?” And “Yeah, of course.” And then, “October 7th, maybe it wasn’t so bad, you know, justified resistance” and these kinds of things that came out, but there was just this huge substrata of society that suddenly came out, emboldened by what happened on October 7th, marching in the streets. People were shocked. And of course, the authorities had to react, and they outlawed certain slogans or at least banned them for protests for a certain amount of time because there’s now a debate whether or not the “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” slogan is actually against the law or can actually be banned because there are other possible interpretations.
So again, the complexities of German legislation and bureaucracy is still there. But yeah, it was very shocking. And then in April this year, another such protest happened and then authorities cracked down on that by banning slogans that called for a caliphate because they were deemed directly anti-democratic.
But again, there’s a way around it. There’s this whole debate going on, whether saying the famous “caliphate is the solution” slogan is actually a call for a caliphate or just a statement of opinion. So, it’s complex, but it was quite shocking. And what was interesting to me is that they also banned sex-segregated protests. So they recognised that that really is against Germany’s idea of equality, that you can’t just do that. So they can’t really ban the protest, but they can establish and set up certain ground rules that go against some of the ideas that are being, not necessarily shouted, but that manifest in the context of such protests. But yeah, they were big and for a lot of people, it was really eye-opening to see that there’s such a huge part of the larger community that just doesn’t want democracy, doesn’t care about democracy and that integration not only has failed, but is actively rejected by a lot of people in this group. So you’d see slogans like calling Germany “an assimilation dictatorship” or a “dictatorship of values,” was a slogan out there. We have certain values. Of course, we’re going to force them because otherwise what’s a democracy to do other than defend itself against its enemies? But you could really see there’s a lack of a lack of understanding of that mindset and that philosophy and it’s very widespread and it’s not just a small radical fringe. You could see that. These people are in the middle of society. They’re really well connected, but if you start digging, there are some really shocking attitudes.
Last week, in Western Germany, there was this huge international Muslim ecumenical meeting of moderate Muslims, 50,000 strong. That happened last year, an official event. So, that group is quite emphatic about their being moderate. But, again, you will find that men and women will be separated at the event, and things like that are still going on. So it’s really widespread and quite troubling to a lot of people.
II: How many of the people who have been radicalised do you think are second generation, and how many are recent immigrants? Is it the same kind of issue that is happening often in the UK, which is that the second generation are often more radicalised than their parents? In some cases, even, the parents came to the UK to escape Islamist regimes, but their children have radicalised. Do you have any sense of whether this is a phenomenon of recent immigrants or if this is a generational issue?
GA: The difference between immigration to Germany and the UK is that immigration from Muslim communities other than Turkey is quite a new phenomenon. Whereas, of course, in the UK, because of empire and all that, you’ve always had a certain influx of people from Muslim parts of Asia. That’s a difference. So there’s a lot of recent immigrants, many of whom haven’t had a chance to have kids that would be old enough to be radicalised in that way. So when you look back on, let’s say the recent event, the recent stabbing, the attacker was a recent immigrant. So, he came to Germany two years ago. He was denied asylum. And the scandal, of course, now is: Why was he still here to carry out … without any perspective? He just was here, right? And he was radicalised or radicalised himself, however you want to frame it. A lot of the radical people that commit crimes will be recent immigrants. Generally, the crime statistics show that recent immigrants are vastly disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes, especially knife crimes, things like that. So that’s going on. Of course, the same problem that you described for the UK also exists here where even a second generation feels at odds with the mainstream society, not having really been taught its values, which isn’t really their fault. It’s just because they grew up in their community where those values are not necessarily shared and there’s a tendency among progressives, who are very often cultural relativists to say, “Well, we have our values, they have theirs, we’re going to come together at some point.” But that’s not what has happened and what we’re seeing.
I used to work in the asylum sector, actually. I don’t think I mentioned this in the piece. I did for seven years in Vienna at the central authority responsible for handing out benefits to newcomers. So the Austrian government has set up this program called Grundversorgung, so basic support, basic needs support or whatever you want to call it.
II: Basic needs, yeah.
GA: Where pretty much anyone who applies for asylum gets a certain amount of money per month, a certain amount of money per kid and so on. And they would come to this place where I worked, and I was doing administration for it and bookkeeping and stuff like that. And there, obviously, you experience firsthand what’s going on. And you see that ... it’s really weird because you’re handing out money to someone who you know for a fact has just come back from Syria to fight for ISIS. Because what is this Muslim dude from Chechnya or Georgia or whatever doing coming back from Syria? So you know what’s going on.
We put up posters—without words, just images—explaining the most basic rules of behaviour towards women, especially. You would just always think, “Why would you even have to say that? Why would you even have to tell someone that you can’t just grope a woman and things like that?” It was really shocking. Of course, the patriarchy in that culture was rife. They wouldn’t let the wives talk at all, but of course the Austrian government sees them as equals. A lot of men just wouldn’t have it and just didn’t understand why we would even want to talk to his wife. And then you knew that once you handed her the money, especially when it was cash—because a lot of newcomers didn’t have bank accounts yet—it would end up in his pocket once they went out the door.
So it was quite frustrating and disillusioning for someone who’s always been more on the left when it comes to immigration. But yeah, it’s reality. We witnessed a lot of violence. One of our clients was killed. It was just the day before. A woman killed by her husband. Things like that were going on. You could say, “What are we doing?”
And then you saw a really big difference once the war in Ukraine started, because we had a lot of Ukrainian refugees coming in. And that, again, was eye-opening to really highlight the difference in culture that you would observe, because the people coming in were showing great gratitude just to be safe. Ukraine is just a couple hundred kilometres from Vienna. So it’s not far. So it’s not like they have to go through a lot of different countries to get there. There were even people who, when it was safe to go back to their town, would come to our office and offer to pay the money back that they had received. A lot of people offered to volunteer to translate if they spoke German or English. So it’s a whole different, a completely different atmosphere and mindset that was going on. Those are just some first-hand experiences that really play into all that and explain where I’m coming from also.
II: In the last ten minutes of this interview, I wanted to ask: This is a big question, but what do you feel, what kind of actions would you like to see the German government taking? Or what kind of attitudes would you like to see more prevalent among German leftists? What for you would be for you some good steps forward, some positive things that could be done to tackle some of these problems?
GA: Right. I guess I’m one of those people who’s been driven away from the Left by wokeness, but also [by] getting a bit of a grasp of economics, which the far Left and communism and things like that don’t seem to have. So it’s difficult because I don’t consider myself as being of the Left anymore. I don’t like the label. I’m not a conservative. I’m not on the left. I’m just floating around, I guess.
If they started to put facts and evidence before ideology, that would be a good start, right? Especially on the left. I guess you have the same problem on the far right as well, when it goes to extremes, that’s what you always see. So that would be a good start. But, coming back to the dilemma that I’m describing in the piece, which ties into that, is that of course what you saw on the Left—and this goes pretty far to the centre, maybe even crossing the centre—is this influence of the postcolonial mindset and theory that came in. You don’t really have this kind of Left that sees as its main purpose to look after the working class, right? You don’t have that. You have a weird moral elitism that is going on. We all know what I’m talking about. What people called “wokeness.” Now people shy away from the term, but I think I want to bring it back more because they called themselves woke just a couple of years ago. So, we should take them by their word and it’s good to have an umbrella term because I think it’s even a tactic to try to diffuse this ideology and to confuse people by not having a term for it and now pretending like the Right invented “woke” as a term. I’m trying not to play into their hands by not calling them on their shit, as it were. But recent years, with the postcolonial stuff, when that got really strong, that really undermined the anti-antisemitism cause that the left had. It really undermined some of the Western value structure that was underlying leftist ideology that was mostly about economics. You don’t have that anymore. And now it’s [postcolonialism] seeped into the culture so much that I really don’t know how to extract anything positive from leftist thought at the moment that has any redeeming value at this point because it’s everywhere. With the postcolonialism, it’s really been pulling the rug out under a lot of really sensible and maybe reasonable policies and opinions that were floating around on the Left. But now it’s all about speech codes and people seem to have a sense that to be on the left, to be progressive, they have to go all in with whatever the latest fad is. You have to go all in. It’s almost the mirror image of Trumpism in a way, because there also, there is this cult of personality. You’re either for it all the way or you’re no longer part of the corps.
I recently felt that first-hand. Maybe I should mention this because, as you know, I’m a musician as well. And I recently got cancelled by the UK punk scene this summer for my...
II: Sorry to laugh. I’m laughing at them. You were cancelled by the punks. You’re too controversial for punks. It’s just absurd, isn’t it?
GA: Yeah, it is funny because it’s so niche and all that… Because they discovered my heterodox activities online and they weren’t very pleased. We call those people “the scene police.” They’re going around and trying to smoke out any dissenters. But it had some real-life consequences because a lot of my friendships are tied into the music scene and things like that. And we had concerts planned for September, actually, and those concerts are now going ahead without me because it became too risky. I mean, these are some of my oldest friends, in those bands, but it became too risky for them because in some cases, their livelihoods are tied into the scene as well. It became too risky for them to be associated with me.
II: I’m so sorry. That sucks. That’s really sad.
GA: [I was cancelled] over opinions. It’s quite shocking. And I tried to reach out to my detractors a little just to see … because they were actually quite close to our little community and the band and things like that, some of them people I knew or people who know me. It’s really weird, but it was just a complete blanket, “No, we’re not going to talk to you.” Just this kind of thing. And these are people who see themselves as being at the forefront of a positive progressive movement that’s happening. And it’s really just the same old cancel culture and in-group thinking. But it ties into what I just said about being all-in. It’s a purification process. The most radical elements are trying to purify the movement of anyone who doesn’t go all the way. And this is a very common thing that you see in radical circles, that there’s a tendency towards ever increasing radicalisation. And then obviously to keep that going, you have to get rid of people who are not all-in. Obviously, a lot of the stuff I’ve said goes directly against what they’re thinking. But at the end of the day, it’s just opinions. But if you’re of the opinion that words are violence and all these kinds of things, then such actions seem justified to you. And that’s what we’re seeing.
But, as I said, there might be some redeeming value in the Left or even the far Left because very often the motivations are positive: there’s fighting poverty and things like that. But that’s obviously not how to get there. It’s been quite frustrating, but I’ve removed myself from those circles over the last couple of years anyway, and it really freed me up in terms of my thinking, which is great.
II: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking so clearly and giving us an insight into what’s going on in Germany. That was very useful. Thank you, Gerfried.
GA: My pleasure. Thank you.
