Wolfgang Streeck, reviewing Ronen Steinke’s »Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht«:

Maaßen made public the notes for a speech he had given at a secret international meeting of domestic intelligence services. In them he claimed that the SPD, Merkel’s coalition partner, had ‘radical leftists’ in its ranks. The SPD demanded Maaßen’s dismissal, and in November 2018 he was sacked.

His successor, Thomas Haldenwang, was also a CDU member, though of a more Merkelian sort. According to Steinke, in January 2021 he was about to publish a report announcing that his office had found the AfD suspect of anti-constitutional ‘extremism’ and was placing it under formal observation (which would allow intelligence methods such as wiretapping and infiltration by undercover agents), when he was called to Seehofer’s office. The draft report, which Seehofer had been sent, had cited a prominent AfD politician saying ‘Islam does not belong to Germany.’ Seehofer’s problem was that he and other leading CSU members had repeatedly used those same words.

…

In the summer of 2023 Friedrich Merz, the new CDU leader and a long-standing opponent of Merkel, ended the battle between the CDU and CSU, and declared, as Merkel had, that the AfD should be seen as an enemy rather than as a potential coalition partner. Facing regional elections in September 2024 in three eastern states where the AfD was leading the CDU in the polls, as well as a federal election a year later, Merz bet on what was effectively a grand coalition of ‘all democratic parties’ united in a ‘Kampf gegen Rechts’, a battle against the right. (This was not without risk: quite a few of the CDU’s fellow combatants consider Merz and his party to be more on the other side than on their own, while many of Merz’s supporters would prefer a Kampf gegen Links.) This battle involved erecting an institutional, political and social ‘firewall’ against the AfD, with the aim of excluding it from elections – not quite getting it banned by the constitutional court, but with much the same effect.

…

As long as a party is judged to possess a covert substructure that might allow it to attempt the overthrow of the state – as might have been the case with the SRP and the DKP – the argument for banning it is relatively easy to make. There was no suspicion that the NPD had such a capacity, however; or that the AfD does.

For some time, the four Staatsparteien (the CDU/CSU, Greens, SPD and Free Democrats), which describe themselves as ‘democratic’ as opposed to ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’, have co-operated to exclude AfD MPs from parliamentary business as far as legally possible, for instance by keeping them out of key parliamentary committees. There have also been various forms of social ostracism: for example, the management of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, at the behest of the state government, disinvited a number of AfD politicians from its opening ceremony, for which all parties in the Berlin parliament traditionally receive free tickets. In March the Bundestag football team announced that AfD MPs and their staff would no longer be allowed to play. But since the Kampf gegen Rechts began, support for the AfD has remained fairly steady, around 15 per cent. (In early July, two weeks after the European elections, the AfD came second in a nationwide poll, with 16.9 per cent, one percentage point above its result in the elections and close to its highest ever poll result of 17.2 per cent in 2023. The AfD was followed by the SPD on 14.6 per cent. As a rule of thumb, what the battle against the right removes from the party’s support in West Germany is balanced by what it adds in the East.) Earlier this year, the AfD reported that its membership has exceeded forty thousand, an increase of more than 60 per cent on 2023.

Whereas the BfV used to operate more or less behind the scenes, under Haldenwang and the SPD’s Nancy Faeser, minister of the interior since 2021, public announcements on investigations into AfD-related right-wing activity have become common. Today the BfV and its Länder equivalents inform the public of their work not only in yearly reports, but also in regular press conferences. Their labelling of enemies of the constitution can be challenged in administrative courts, but it takes time for cases to be heard. Decisions on the status of potentially ‘extremist’ individuals and organisations are made in camera, without those under suspicion being interviewed. Despite its past disasters, Verfassungsschutz agencies are still highly respected by a German public eager for reassurance. Once someone is placed under observation, declared ‘suspect’ or classified as a ‘proven extremist’, the media always notes this status.

…

Today, the BfV and the sixteen Landesämter form a central pillar of an institutional regime that bridges state and civil society, and aims at the manufacture of political consent and what has recently come to be called ‘social cohesion’. Underlying this is the peculiar readiness of German elites to carry out orders even before they are given, which means that they may not have to be given at all. Visitors from countries with a tradition of accepting or even respecting eccentricity, such as the UK, France and Italy, or from a country as fundamentally disorderly as the United States, tend to be struck by the monolithic appearance of German politics and society, the way everything seems to fall in line with everything else. This is enabled by the interplay between institutions, formal and informal, and by a culture that perceives dissent as selfish and as a threat to social and political unity (it’s also seen as pointless). A recent example is the wave of accusations of antisemitism against protesters, many of them from outside Germany, who have voiced their horror over the Israeli destruction of Gazan society.

On Nov. 9, the day after Donald J. Trump shocked the world, Larry Coryell was sitting in his Orlando home, cussing out the president-elect, fuming about the outcome of the election and plotting an exit strategy for himself and his wife, Tracey. “We’re going to move to Europe,” he declared. “Now that Trump is in … we’re going to make good on our promise to each other to move to either Germany or Ireland.”

Coryell was clearly agitated as the reality of a Trump presidency was sinking in. “This is an unacceptable situation,” he snarled into his phone. “We cannot let all the work we’ve done as jazz musicians to help relationships between people … we can’t let all that go to hell. And that’s what this election is going to do. It’ll take us back to the Dark Ages and people will think that it’s OK to be prejudiced again. Well, I don’t accept it. We have to stand up. … [Trump is] an impostor, a huckster, and he’s got to go. And because I’m a Buddhist I’m going to chant about it and try to turn poison into medicine, and just get deeper and deeper into my music.”

—Bill Milkowski, (2017, February). Remembering Larry Coryell. Downbeat.

Robert McNamara:

On August 4th, it was reported another attack occurred. It was not clear then that that attack had occurred. We made every possible effort to determine whether it had or not. I was in direct communication with the Commander-in-Chief of all of our forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC) by telephone several times during that day, to find out whether it had or hadn’t occurred. He had reports from the commanders of the destroyers on the scene: they had what were known as sonar readings — these are sound readings. There were eyewitness reports. And ultimately it was concluded that almost certainly the attack had occurred. But even at the time there was some recognition of a margin of error, so we thought it highly probable but not entirely certain. And because it was highly probable — and because even if it hadn’t occurred, there was strong feeling we should have responded to the first attack, which we were positive had occurred — President Johnson decided to respond to the second [attack]. I think it is now clear [the second attack] did not occur. I asked [North Vietnamese] General Giap myself, when I visited Hanoi in November of 1995, whether it had occurred, and he said no. I accept that.

Die Zeit:

The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man

It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Great Britain: Penguin, 2017), 349.

text

And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the nomenklatura was introduced. Since mid-1918, if not earlier, the central party bodies had made the main appointments to Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Cheka and the trade unions. In 1923 this system was formalized by the composition of a list of about 5,500 designated party and governmental posts – the nomenklatura – whose holders could be appointed only by the central party bodies. The Secretariat’s Files-and-Distribution Department (Uchraspred) compiled a file-index on all high-ranking functionaries so that sensible appointments might be made.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 148.

Seymour Hersh:

Civilian defense attorney George Latimer speaks to his client Army Lieutenant William Calley as they leave a court-martial hearing.

At 6 am or so, Calley told me that his much admired company captain, a guy named Ernest Medina, who was known to his troops, I would later learn, as “Mad Dog Medina,” was also at Fort Benning awaiting legal proceedings. Medina would tell me, Calley said, that all he had done at My Lai came pursuant to Medina’s direct orders. He dialed a number, and Medina—about whom I knew nothing—picked up immediately. Calley explained that a reporter from Washington was on the phone with him.“Please, Captain,” Calley said, “tell him what I did was under your orders.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Medina said, and he hung up. Calley was stricken.

It was clear that he’d just figured out that he would be the sacrificial lamb. The bad apple. It would all be on him. The generals and colonels and captains who planned the slaughter—to get a high body count in the war and make the generals in Saigon and Washington happy—were going to ride into the sunset.

I was totally exhausted. I told him I had to leave. Calley, in a panic, said: “Let’s go bowling.”

It couldn’t happen. I left, got to the airport, took a plane to Washington, and, exhausted as I was, I began writing the first of what would be five stories over the next months about what happened at My Lai.