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AEIOU's avatar

I predict many people, some in this very comment section, saying that a ban will only make the right stronger. I think that is wishful thinking at its worst and mental gymnastics taking to an extreme sports level. Repression works, which is actually why people try not to fall under it and their enemies want to exercise it. It’s sad that it takes saying, but repeated experience shows it does.

But anyway – tl;dr: Germany is unfixable and the smart move is getting out while the gittin' is good. Depressing elaboration follows.

On an individual basis, for a young or even middle aged German with something on the ball the smart move has been emigration for quite a while and I have been urging German friends to pack their suitcases – to Switzerland if they can hack it, to the US per default, to Thailand if they can stand the heat, to El Salvador for those who want to risk going long on a value pick.

An outright ban on the only actual opposition party might have one good aspect – shake some of the right [sic] people loose before too many have decided to go and the doors slam shut.

To put it plainly, Germany isn’t getting reformed in any meaningful sense to any meaningful degree in any meaningful timeframe. Indeed, there’s a confluence of deep, generational crises that each would be enough to pretty much sink a country, and they’re all entirely baked in at this point. It’s been fun to watch the AfD go, but substantial optimism is wilful self-delusion – consider if everything went perfectly, if every single decision turned on a dime into perfection:

1. You’d be at least 10 (realistically, 20) years off the new reactor fleet coming into the grid at sufficient numbers to get energy back to prices that other locations enjoy during that whole time frame. I.e. you’re baked into most of another generation of industrial decline, which can only accelerate because networks of skill retention weaken with every company that shuts-or-leaves, impelling the next one to follow.

2. The cost of rebuilding reliable generation in Germany would preclude a ton of other urgently necessary infrastructure work, e.g. the grid not being in any way ready for full electrification, particularly of heating and mobility, overshadows that it needs a lot of maintenance anyway, even for preexisting usage patterns, not to speak of the catastrophic rail- and increasingly bad road infrastructure.

3. Even if every criminal invader was thrown out instantly by pure magic at some stroke of midnight, further decline in cohesion and sheer capacity of the population is already baked in by pure demographic momentum and differential fertility. Fixing that problem to a substantial degree would take some actually scary constitutional changes.

4. And even if none of the above were true Germany is increasingly an old folks’ home, and the health and pension systems are broke. Not even fixing, but just managing, those problems in relevant time frames will require scaled-out deployments of Canadian medicine (which are thus almost certain to come). Thus society inevitably becomes more callous, and more openly brutally utilitarian. The alternative is simple bankruptcy, possibly expressed in inflation, which also doesn’t tend to bring out the best in man.

The synthesis of those is a country of sharply declining wealth, with its diverse population increasingly unable to paper over issues with welfare spending, murdering their old and sickly in the background of increasing social strife. Why be around for it.

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Vivian Evans's avatar

I'd say this were unbelievable if there weren't other news from Germany combined with an astonishing silence in the German MSM on this particular issue.

I also suspect the Wanderwitzian attempt has been postponed to next month in the hope of a 'good' outcome on November 5th (an intriguing historical date ...), namely a Kamala Koronation. That would make it so much easier to whip through an AfD ban - not so when Trump wins ...

Ah well, 'interesting times' and all that, innit like ...

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