Resistance Is Not Futile

Some have expressed a general pessimism in response to my reporting on the German farmers’ protest and my posts on rising support for Alternative für Deutschland. They think the protest is too little and much too late, that the establishment have easily marginalised the demonstrators, and that merely voting for an opposition party like Alternative für Deutschland will not change anything. For these people, anything short of a revolution is unsatisfactory.

I find this all-or-nothing approach counter-productive; it is an analogue of the political complacency that has been such a huge problem in Germany, and it has the same practical consequences. At the same time, it’s important to keep one’s expectations realistic. Many people on our side of things place far too much hope in protests and other acts of dissent, and are inevitably disappointed when these fail to achieve drastic change. This, I think, is where political pessimism comes from in the first place. I also don’t think voting AfD into office has the potential to solve anything in itself. Popular anti-government protests and political support for opposition parties, however, are important first steps. Neglecting them is like refusing to travel, because after the first few kilometres of your journey, you will still have yet to get to where you want to go.

I also admit that the odds are stacked against any particular political action or opposition party. It is always very safe to predict that these will fail, because at any given moment, the chances that things will continue as they are tend to be greater than the chances that they will change utterly. We must always remember, however, that nothing lasts forever. All regimes, political systems and ideologies sooner or later find their way into the historical dustbin. The highly improbable is guaranteed to happen at some point; we just can’t predict that point with any confidence.

It is instructive to study what the German political establishment itself regards as threatening and how it reacts to dissent. The government and all major parties are very concerned about the rising popularity of AfD. This is hardly what we’d expect if voting for the AfD were useless. They are also deeply worried about the farmers’ protest, which is why they have exerted such effort to stage their own thinly disguised counter-demonstrations. This shows both that the regime do not think protesting in general is pointless, and also that they don’t think the farmers pose no threat to them.

Why are they afraid of these things?