ConWatch: Week 1,813
Does Germany have a constitution yet? This week: What Europe thinks of basic rights in Germany, more Jewbans, and the Gleichschaltung of intel oversight.
Editor’s note: We gave Germany’s constitution an extra day to show itself this week. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
Since we first revealed it, new evidence has surfaced that further demonstrates the lack of intelligence of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV.
If its translation abilities are any reflection of its ability to make threat assessments, we can have high confidence in our low confidence in the BfV’s assertion that Jewish groups such as Jüdische Stimme, and affiliated organizations, pose an “extremist” threat to Germany’s democratic and semi-constitutional order. Say what you want about Jewish activists’ non-violent opposition to Israeli state violence, but calling it “right-wing” in your English-language summary just makes you sound silly.
Especially when your original report in German doesn’t say that.
Thankfully, Germany is a democracy with rule of law and stuff. That means someone is watching the watchers. Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, has an intelligence oversight committee, whose one job is to make sure that, inter alia, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is protecting the so-called constitution.
And this committee is surely in good hands, even if there are just 12 of them now. The full Bundestag, currently in its 21st iteration, voted to put just six of their colleagues on the committee1 — down from nine in the previous legislative period and 13 in the one before that. Rest assured, though, these six are the most “fitting” for a task as important as ensuring that Germany’s intelligence apparatus doesn’t relapse into a Gestasi malaise.
That is to say, the oversight body is comprised completely of MPs from the parties in power that run the ministries that are home to the agencies that the MPs are tasked with keeping an eye on.
OK, that isn’t exactly fair, as one of the six committee members is from the Greens, which technically makes that guy from the “opposition.” But saying the Greens oppose anything is a little like saying the gas deals they agreed to are a bridge to a clean energy future. Right.
The only reason the Greens didn’t stay in government, after the three-way they were part of collapsed, is the mere mathematical misfortune of majoritarian politics.
Nowhere within a V2’s distance of the intelligence oversight committee is the largest opposition party, and the second-largest of them all, the far-right AfD. This is probably not unwise, as the AfD itself is — however unreasonably argued — on the BfV’s shitlist. Less understandably absent, though, is Die Linke2 , the left-wingers who came back from the dead and roughly doubled their vote share in February’s general election.
When Die Linke recently tried to get its party co-chair on the oversight committee, the smidge-left-of-AfD ruling conservatives said nein. Or, more precisely, “not recommendable.”
No matter how much evidence piles up exposing Fourth Reich fantasies among Germany’s right-wing milieu, whataboutism-ing left-wing activism is a convenient way for the Teutonic Imaginary to keep political power where it belongs: in the “center,” however the “center” might like to define itself.
As with any political party, there are certainly many reasonable disagreements to have with Die Linke. Accusing it of currently undergoing a “phase of radicalization” is probably not one of them, least of all when the accusation comes from a member of a governing party whose views on abortion are largely unchanged since 1950 1850, dreams of stripping people of their citizenship, and authoritarian ideas of Staatsräson rise above international law.
These are the same folks who recently moved into the federal interior ministry, which oversees the BfV. A housewarming gift from the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner was the friendly reminder that, yes, fundamental rights are still a thing you need to protect even if you disagree with the people exercising those rights.
That those people include the BfV’s “extremist” Jews, and those rights include freedom of expression at German universities, it’s a bad time for the latter to be banning the former using the BfV as a pretext. This is exactly what happened in Bremen, barely a week after the interior minister replied to the Commissioner, assuring him that everything is fine in Germany.
Of course, no one told the University of Bremen to do that. It was a choice to show a “hasty loyalty to a German state body depriving a Jewish intellectual, and the organization of which she is a part, of the public space to discuss her work and criminalizing it.”
Unfortunately, making that choice is “not only the height of moral repugnance for a German rectorate in a time of rising fascism; it is also explicitly antisemitic.”
On the bright side, these are merely the lunatic ravings of a professor there. The intelligence oversight committee in the Bundestag is surely safe from such “radicalized” views.
Admittedly, we have not fact-checked whether all six committee members are indeed two-handed and mean no disrespect should it be otherwise.
Remember, dear readers, “die” here is the German feminine definite article, not the imperative of the English verb — much as the latter may reflect a certain rhetorical sentiment towards the Left in some corners of the German political and media establishment.