ConWatch: Week 1,811
Does Germany have a constitution yet?
Editor’s note: The Bupkes regrets the delay in this week’s ConWatch, which coincided with traveling back in time, space, and uncertainty. NB: When working at 10,000 meters without internet, always check your file sync before Trump-proofing.
Following the recent release of Germany’s annual domestic intelligence report, The Bupkes has conducted its own intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence (der Verfassungsschutz, or the merciful abbreviation BfV).
The report, a first of its kind, makes a dramatic finding: It concludes that Germany’s domestic intelligence — sometimes known by the more adorably erudite and literal translation, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution — is neither especially intelligent nor particularly concerned with constitutionality.
What the BfV does appear deft at, however, is representing the interests of a “foreign power.” Who are we to say, of course, but this seems like the kind of thing that might land you in a domestic intelligence report.
As it happens, the foreign power in question is the one that came off the back of Germany’s erstwhile efforts to genocide the group of people from which some went on to found the foreign power in question. This is surely just a coincidence.
Nonetheless, it strikes us as odd for a number of reasons. After all, if the intelligence service of the foreign power in question just built itself a secret drone base three countries over in the desert of its archenemy, any help from the intelligence service of another state seems superfluous, least of all from one that can’t even build a train station in Stuttgart.
And yet! Germany’s domestic intelligence looks eager to please, as it expresses fewer qualms over how people feel about its own state than how they feel about the foreign power in question.
There is a loose thread of left-wing activism in Germany literally called the “antideutsch”: people who detest German nationalism for what they see as its role in spawning antisemitism.
Their name alone might be reason enough for Germany’s domestic intelligence to want to follow them. Yet the antideutsch get just a single passing mention.
In appendix IV of our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence, we recommend that the antideutsch work on that.
Our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence postulates that one reason for this is to avoid the risk of self-incrimination; the BfV is a little antideutsch itself.
Since the shame of German nationalism often presents itself in the form of an unhealthy preoccupation with Jewish nationalism, the mission of the antideutsch is to confront criticism of the latter as a means of rejecting the former.
This appears to be a central mission of Germany’s domestic intelligence as well. One could read its report and be forgiven for thinking that, in the opinion of the BfV, it is preferable to deny Germany’s right to exist than that of the foreign power in question. That is, to the extent such a right to exist exists.
Who said notions of Staatsräson didn’t have useful, pseudo-legal applications?
As we write these words, untold numbers of people may be running around Germany fantasizing about the demise of France, Canada, Bhutan — or even Narnia — but there is no way of assessing the threat posed to Germany’s allies and beloved young adult Christian literature because the BfV does not track it; only your quibbles with the foreign power in question will make you the proud beneficiary of BfV surveillance.
These quibbles may include factual suggestions that the foreign power in question had plenty of warning that its enemy was up to something going into October 2023; may have put concerns for political liability above the safety and survival of its citizens that day; and has since killed and maimed an “unimaginable” number of children in the territory nominally controlled by its enemy and certainly not occupied by the foreign power in question.
Criticizing the foreign power in question, however, for killing all those kids may lead the BfV to accuse you of “spreading the antisemitic ‘child murder’ narrative."
In appendix VII of our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence, The Bupkes makes clear that, apart from the small number of people in said territory who received regular late-night “u up?” calls from the penultimate Pope, the children there do not apply to the Blood Libel myth of Medieval Christian Europe. It further emphasizes that no amount of child blood, Christian or otherwise, could ever make matzah taste good.
Only a goy would come up with the ridiculous notion of Pesach’s “bread of affliction” as a scrumptious snack.
Our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence suspects it may have slept through parts of its Hannah Arendt seminar. While that is understandable — some nudnik scheduled it for Mondays at 8 a.m., a crime against humanity in its own right — the resulting knowledge gaps have clearly impacted the BfV’s ability to understand the sources, mechanisms, and effects of possible harms to the democratic-constitutional order it seeks to protect.
One key lesson missed seems to be Arendt’s theory on the National-Socialist brand of antisemitism, which posits it had less to do with nationalism than the global phenomena of imperialism and totalitarianism that predicated postwar (West) Germany's need for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the first place.
Following this theory should lead one to conclude that the “larger part” of the “left-wing extremist scene” is an insignificant wellspring of antisemitism, precisely due to its “anti-imperialist” agenda. Thus, it need not take up the significant space in Germany’s domestic intelligence report that it does.
Our intelligence report recommends looking elsewhere.
A good place to start could be with those in Germany who feel compelled to enable, excuse, and embolden extremist forces, including those with criminal records in the foreign power in question for their suspected or convicted roles in threatening the democratic-constitutional order.
These efforts have a synergizing effect closer to home that the BfV might consider “anti-liberal and anti-democratic.”
The total absence of this aspect from Germany’s domestic intelligence report is disappointing, to be polite about it, especially in light of contemporary Germany’s rhetorical fealty to supranational and multilateral structures — established in the aftermath of a past Germany’s dedication to humanity’s worst impulses — meant to constrain humanity’s worst impulses.
Despite the many glaring shortcomings, however, our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence does observe some bright spots. During the Arendt seminar, for example, the BfV looks to have paid closer attention to her differentiation of antisemitism and Jew-hatred — or Jew-anything, for that matter.
This is why The Bupkes is far less concerned than some others about the BfV classifying Jews and Jewish groups like Jüdische Stimme as “confirmed right-wing extremist threats” for their support of non-violent methods, such as sanctions and divestment, to oppose state-sponsored violence and egregious violations of international law.
If anything, such a classification serves as an affirmative case study in Arendt’s argument that antisemitism “has little to do with actual Jews,” but is a “political weapon that deploys fantasies about Jews to achieve political interests, often interests that have nothing to do with Jews themselves.”
We might call such “political interests” Schuldkult, but given that term’s neo-Nazi revisionist origins in the service of denouncing postwar Germany’s overbearing guilt complex — as a means of passing off Germany’s genociding as nothing worse than Allied war-making — doing so would likely win you a spot in Germany’s domestic intelligence report.
Nonetheless, we do not wish to engage in a kind of denial ourselves. If Germany’s domestic intelligence can now decide that Jews are unsafe for Jews, anyone can be.
We’re looking at you, Tom Friedman.
Thankfully, our intelligence report on Germany’s domestic intelligence finds little reason to take Germany’s domestic intelligence all that seriously. Given its history of fumbling investigations of extremist activity, impeding others, lacking transparency in conducting them, and suffering from leadership who would themselves qualify for surveillance, we have concluded that Germany’s domestic intelligence amounts to little more than
bupkes.
What else could an Office for the Protection of the Constitution be, though, when its state has no constitution to protect? The same, we might add, goes for the foreign power in question. This is also surely just a coincidence.