BREAKING: In latest threat to German democracy, 'fascists' appropriate vacuous club anthem from 1999, use its melody to demand the deportation of foreigners

“Fascism,” as popularly understood, is both very bad and also very ill-defined, being a negative political vice characterised primarily in opposition to that equally ill-defined political virtue known as “democracy.” This “democracy,” whatever it may be, is distinguished above all by its fuzzy associations with a wide array of other virtues, like diversity, inclusiveness, equity and transsexuality. Fascism is mostly the opposite of all of these things, which sounds bad enough, but it gets much worse: Because democracy is a very fragile virtue, forever requiring vigilant defence and social fertiliser, fascism has become the most ineradicable and indestructible of weeds.

Or perhaps it is better, in our post-pandemic era, to say that fascism is like a virus. It is always spreading, despite (or because of?) our best efforts to kill it off. We vaccinate children against the fascist virus with years of indoctrination about the evils of National Socialism in school, but to judge from the present state of our political discourse, this programme has worked about as well as the mRNA jabs worked against Covid. Never have we preached so stridently against fascism, and never has it been so omnipresent.

Another curious property of fascism, is that it does not merely infect human brains. It can also taint cultural artefacts, like phrases. All of the very best people can use a specific phrase, but that does not matter at all should the fascists get ahold of it. Once they have run the benign words through their evil fascist mouths, anyone who utters them afterwards – whatever his intentions – may well be guilty of fascism. If only democracy were that effective and powerful.

As we’ve learned from the events of the past week, the Germ Theory of Fascism applies also to songs, even vacuous pop music. All of the most democratic people in Germany have worked themselves up into a collective outrage against an unremarkable 1999 Italodance tune called ‘L’amour toujours’ (‘Love always’) by Gigi D’Agostino, because some very bad fascists have been caught singing some very naughty lyrics to its indifferent melody. The fascists themselves have been cancelled of course, and the song is on its way to its own separate cancellation as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last Thursday, clubs and bars on the holiday island of Sylt filled as always with merrymakers for the long Pentecost weekend. One group of revellers filmed a video of themselves singing the “Nazi slogans” “Ausländer raus” (“foreigners out”) and “Deutschland den Deutschen” (“Germany for the Germans”) to the tune of L’amour toujours, thereby making themselves the focus of the latest nationwide self-discrediting histrionic freakout “against the right.”

How this particular nothingburger of a scandal unfolded is as boring as it is predictable. Our grave transgressors first shared their video to a private chat, whence it leaked to the broader internet. Within 24 hours, major German media were reporting on this latest manifestation of fascism. Press outlets that are normally accustomed to blur the faces and withhold the names of those accused of criminal offences suddenly forgot all of their scruples in this case. One of the revellers turned out to be an assistant to a “social media influencer” named Milena Karl, which lent the entire scandal an additional frisson. Soon all the video fascists had been doxxed and summarily fired. The venue where they had committed their unspeakable act of fascism posted a slavering apology to Instagram and issued everyone involved a lifelong ban from the premises. And of course it goes without saying that the police are now investigating this grave assault on our democracy.

Now, this isn’t the first time Germans have filmed themselves singing this magical fascist incantation, which if left unchecked is likely to incite the next Machtergreifung. It has been a trend on TikTok for months, and many miniature freakouts have preceded this great big one. Because efforts to stop fascism seem perversely always to promote it, still more incidents have followed in the wake of our ongoing hyperventilation, and even more will surely come, as our schoolmarmocracy proves incapable of the slightest moderation and insists on raging, lecturing and prosecuting over every such transgression.

What has made the Sylt episode more salient than its sister incidents, is hard to say. The miniature news vacuum opened by the holiday weekend surely played a role. Also relevant is that our prior freakout “against the right,” occasioned by the Dresden assault on an SPD politician, has died down, and for almost a week now we have not been freaking out at all, which is no way to run a democracy. The Sylt episode is furthermore useful for flattering specific progressive ideological preconceptions. In contrast to prior related offences, the revellers were not random students in a club, but rather well-off professionals, which makes them convenient for reinforcing the core dogma that those whose wealth our politicians would most like to redistribute are also those most guilty of racism, xenophobia and other assorted fascist sins. Finally, it helps enormously that one of the men in the video can be seen offering a slack, distinctly metrosexual Roman salute and giving himself a two-fingered Hitler moustache …

… although here as elsewhere our rulers are overeager to misread these gestures. National Socialism, being dead and gone, can no longer attract the casual allegiance of unthinking party-goers. All that is left to interact with – and to mock – is the propagandised simulacrum of Nazism that the German state itself has maintained for its own ideological purposes.

Above all, though, Germany has a lot of problems. Because most of these problems have been inflicted by our very own ruling class, it is of the utmost importance to ignore them, and to find other pseudo-problems to address instead. Apparently few pseudo-problems are more appetising than the pseudo-problem of random people singing off-colour lyrics to dumb club music.

The ritual condemnations have proceeded one after the other:

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has reacted with outrage to the video showing young people chanting racist slogans outside a pub in Sylt. “Such slogans are disgusting, they are unacceptable,” said Scholz. There should be “no tolerance.” The Federal Chancellor went on to say that the trend must be prevented “from spreading.” …

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) spoke of a “disgrace for Germany.” “What we are seeing there is disgusting and inhumane,” she told the Funke Mediengruppe. She also warned against a “creeping normalisation” of racism. It is important that perpetrators “in their circle of friends, at work, in sport” encounter clear opposition. …

Ricarda Lang, Federal Chairwoman of the Green Party, asked at an election campaign event in Karlsruhe: “What kind of neglect of prosperity is this? What kind of absurd madness is this?” She could hardly bear to watch the video. "When I see something like that, it just makes me sick.” …

Schleswig-Holstein's Minister President Daniel Günther (CDU) described the scenes captured on video as serious offences. “We will take consistent and tough action against such crimes,” Günther said. “We are fighting right-wing extremism with the utmost determination.”

Our marshmallow minister Faeser, who considers it her foremost responsibility to denounce whatever it is she imagines the “extreme right” to be, of course had even more to say. It is not sufficient to condemn specific transgressors; Faeser must also cast their transgressions as indicative of broader social tendencies, by way of arrogating to herself jurisdiction over the tone of “political discussions” and our general cultural “values”:

….Faeser … has described the xenophobic slogans in the so-called Sylt video as “inhumane” and “racist” and warned against an escalation in society: “We must be careful that values do not shift. That’s why it's also very important to show the boundaries there,” Faeser said … “That's something I’m very concerned about. There are things in our society where we should react with much more mutual respect and appreciation. That has to come back, also in political discussions.”

All of this is very righteous and brave, but it is to expected that in the great tumble to out-signal the rest of the virtuous, there will be a few missteps. Standing out from the crowd, after all, is very hard, when you have nought but canned preformulated outrage at your disposal. Thus we can forgive Bundestag president Bärbel Bas for going a little further than most with her remarks at a town hall event over the weekend:

One advantage is that there’s this video, and I’ve also watched it. You can also identify certain people, and I assume that they ... we have a criminal code that punishes such things, including anti-constitutional slogans. And I say we must apply this criminal code ... and perhaps also impose a maximum penalty. But that is a matter for the judiciary, anyway we have the possibilities, and especially in today’s world, the advantage is that this video can be used to identify people who have joined in the chanting, and I hope they get a decent sentence.

The worst thing that the people in the Sylt video may be guilty of is the crime of “incitement,” which would entail a maximum prison sentence of five years. As Jünge Freiheit points out, that is more time than German rapists and paedophiles typically receive. It is also the sentence handed down to the Antifa terrorist Lina E., for participating in a series of brutal hammer attacks against alleged “neo-Nazis.”

Bas is of course a social democrat, which is the dumbest party in the Federal Republic, and so it is wholly appropriate that she should’ve unwittingly furnished us with this helpful equivalence. Telling foreigners to get out of the country is just as bad as running a criminal gang devoted to cracking skulls with blunt instruments. Got it.

The SPD only deepened their performative self-parody by posting this graphic to Instagram:

The Sylt revellers had chanted “Germany for the Germans,” but in this image the SPD proposed an improvement: “Germany for those Germans who defend our democracy.” Checkmate fascists! Except, “Germany for the Germans” is a slogan most closely identified with Der Heimat (formerly the NPD), an “ultranationalist” and “neo-Nazi” party. Realising that they had unwittingly reproduced the forbidden Nazi incantation, and were therefore guilty of spreading this horror virus, our crack SPD social media team swiftly deleted their post and threw up a hasty apology:

We just published a post condemning in the strongest possible terms what we all saw in a video from Sylt. We did not manage to strike a tone that would resonate with everyone. We would like to sincerely apologise for this. Our aim is to make it clear that we do not want to leave this country to the far right and hate preachers. We want to defend our democracy and our freedom. Let’s continue this fight together in solidarity!

This is one of those missteps that really leaves you scratching your head. After hours of foaming at the mouth about “neo-Nazi slogans,” our virtue-mongering social democrats posted their own version of those very same tainted words to Instagram, in apparent ignorance of their origins and deeper significance. We are left to ask what they imagined they were angry about in the first place.

The German press have unearthed the has-been pop artist Gigi D’Agostino himself, to see what he makes of the extreme right-wing appropriations of his song. In a remarkable development, he insists that the piece is all about love and not about hate at all, which is very helpful, because we never could’ve grasped that from the highly ambiguous title:

“My song ‘L’amour toujours’ is about a wonderful, great and intense feeling that unites people. It is the power of love that makes me soar,” D’Agostino said…

All the love that his song is about cannot be summarised in a few moments or in a day, a month or a year. For this reason, he gave his song the title ‘L'amour toujours,’ which means ‘love always.’ ‘That's the only meaning my song has,’ D’Agostino said.

Despite D’Agostino’s relentless banality, German authorities are hard at work banning ‘L’amour toujours’ from as many public venues as possible. “Germany for the Germans” is fascist because the NPD used the phrase, and now ‘L’amour toujours’ is fascist because some people chanted “Germany for the Germans” to its melody on an island in the North Sea. There is no saving this song:

After various right-wing extremist incidents involving the well-known party hit ‘L'Amour Toujours,’ the song has been banned from the Munich Oktoberfest.

“The song will not be played – neither in the tents nor anywhere else,” said Clemens Baumgärtner (CSU), the Munich economic affairs officer responsible for organising the Oktoberfest ... Clear instructions have been issued to landlords and showmen.

“There is no place for all that right-wing shit at the Wiesn” … Baumgärtner said. Although the song itself is not right-wing extremist, it has taken on a “very clear right-wing extremist connotation…”

Organisers of upcoming major events in Stuttgart also want to prevent ‘L’amour toujours’ from being played: Neither in the fan zone of the European Football Championship nor at the Cannstatter People’s Festival in autumn is the song allowed …

The city of Erlangen announced on Friday that ‘L'amour toujours’ would no longer be played at the Erlangen Bergkirchweih … following a joint decision by the organisers.

I have my own theory about all of this.

Once upon a time, teenagers sustained a vibrant countercultural leftism, which was all about telling the establishment to go fuck itself, ingesting inadvisable quantities of drugs and engaging in a lot of inadvisable sex. All of that was very transgressive and exciting, directed as it was against a much more conservative and straight-laced German society. They shocked people, and that was the point. In the decades since, all of those hippies have grown old, and the most ideologically committed of them have become that which they used to hate, namely a lot of insufferable shrivelled scolds. As is the way with scolds everywhere, they’ve unwittingly inspired a new countercultural movement on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing “Ausländer raus” and “Deutschland den Deutschen” will become. Maybe, if they don’t like these words, they should try chilling out and finally shutting the fuck up about fascism. God knows there are more important things to screech about.

In the meantime, our new fascist anthem L’amour toujours has hit the top of the German charts.