Gerany: AfD politicans promote antisemitic conspiracy theories

Christoph Sorg @ OpenDemocracy:

Leading national-liberals such as Hans-Olaf Henkel and Bernd Lucke initially constructed the party profile so that the extreme right would not be alienated, but the party could not be discredited as right-wing at the same time. After failing to make the 5 percent threshold in the 2013 national election, let alone the aspired 7 percent, however, they deliberately opened the AfD further to the right, but quickly lost control over this process. Gauland and Lucke later left to form a new party, the former stating: “We have created a monster.”

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The following months saw the party's extreme right become more and more dominant. This right-wing populism differs from traditional national-socialism in that it often employs the vocabulary of enlightenment and individualism to attack allegedly barbarian ethnicities. It also often shares neoliberalism's contempt for the poor instead of poverty, but importantly distinguishes itself from it by adopting cultural conservatism beyond neoliberalism's love for social stability. Thus marginalized ethnicities are not perceived as cheap labor to be exploited as long as they do not threaten the social order - their mere presence is already perceived as a social ill to be overcome.

Right-wing populist narratives also perceive “genderism“ as an ideology aiming to confuse men and women and thereby destroy the organic unity of the German people. They deem traditional values necessary to reproduce the (implicitly racially purified) German people and thus pivotally perceive women as childbearers for national success. Increasing social rights for women and LGBTI are thus not the product of decades of social struggles, but a “cultural Marxist” conspiracy to infect the national-ethnic body by either dangerous left-wing lunatics (formerly known as Jewish-Bolshevist) or “globalist elites”. Along these lines, structural anti-semitism exists, although less hegemonic so far. The contempt for capitalist modernity vis-à-vis the supposed simpleness of traditional life is testament to this, and so are framings of sinister elites controlling press (“Lügenpresse”), politicians and finance, in more extreme versions planning a genocide against Germany or Europe via mass immigration. In February 2016, Iris Wassill from AfD Munich lectured on so called power elites (“Machtelite”), catering to every single antisemitic fetish from Rothschild, bought media and politicians, George Soros, Federal Reserve to Rothschild, rootless elites, the deliberate destruction of European culture by controlled refugee flows ... to Rothschild. Audience members also learned that feminism is not a form of historical social struggle, but a conspiracy invented by the Rockefellers to destroy society.

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