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3 months agoAre we though?
federal reverse
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2024
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And now we’re copying current US politics but the profiteers aren’t even domestic. Palantir and fracking companies and near everyone else profiteering off this BS government is a foreign billionaire.
The issue is actually solidarity: When Jette Nietzard says something mildly controversial and a bunch of right-wing asshats start a campaign against a young women, there is a large-enough, largely older male part of the Green party that will agree with, at least in part, with such right-wing “criticism”. And that kinda behavior is in fact not how you win elections.
Wait till you learn that that those Catholic organizations running hospitals are largely state-funded as well.
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Be aware that the source is a little dubitable, garnering a “Mixed” rating by MBFC.
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If you look for corroborating articles, it appears this story is only reported in various Indian outlets often ranked similarly, but not in e.g. the Guardian or other UK outlets.
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They’ve drawn this comparison since 2023 and tbh, it always struck me as a little off. The point has always been justifying the “robust” response to the attack as self-defence.
I think it’s a collaboratively created document which, as you noticed, used to be hosted on the site of NCTV but is now hosted on the site of AIVD. :)
Thanks
The document is here. Israel is mentioned multiple times in it, though most times as a target of threats. However, there’s also this (DeepL translation):
Israel also seeks to influence political and public opinion abroad, including Netherlands. This was illustrated by the distribution of a report by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora and Anti-Semitism, following disturbances surrounding the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match in November 2024. The report was not shared with the Dutch government through official channels, but was sent specifically to specific politicians and journalists. The manner of dissemination was called unusual by the Dutch Ministers of Justice and Security and of Foreign Affairs and, because of the potential negative consequences for Dutch residents, undesirable. For example, the individuals mentioned could be intimidated or threatened, or in the most serious case, assaulted.
and
Known targets of state interference are international institutions present in the Netherlands, such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. The United States and Israel publicly expressed threats toward the court, and the United States has imposed sanctions.64 This could damage or even shut down the court’s work, in part because the court may have no or limited access to financial services. Currently, sanctions have only been imposed against a chief prosecutor because of the court’s arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister and former defense minister. However, further completion of the sanctions list is real in time. The U.S. sanctions may in time have profound consequences for the functioning of the court, and thus for the prosecution and trial of individuals suspected of committing international crimes, such as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Also the courts are an interesting target of espionage and undermining influence for a large number of countries, because their nationals can be tried there.
Dutch original
Ook Israël probeert de politieke en publieke opinie te beïnvloeden in het buitenland, waaronder Nederland. Dit werd geïllustreerd met de verspreiding van een rapport van het Israëlische ministerie van Diaspora en Antisemitismebestrijding, naar aanleiding van ongeregeldheden rondom de voetbalwedstrijd Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv in november 2024. Het rapport is niet via de officiële kanalen met de Nederlandse overheid gedeeld, maar is gericht verzonden aan specifieke politici en journalisten. De manier van verspreiding werd door de Nederlandse ministers van Justitie en Veiligheid en van Buitenlandse Zaken ongebruikelijk en, vanwege de mogelijke negatieve gevolgen voor Nederlandse ingezetenen, onwenselijk genoemd. Zo kunnen de genoemde personen worden geïntimideerd of bedreigd, of in het ernstigste geval aangevallen.
Bekende doelwitten van statelijke inmenging zijn in Nederland aanwezige internationale instituties zoals het Internationaal Strafhof en het Internationaal Gerechtshof. De Verenigde Staten en Israël uitten publiekelijk dreigementen richting het hof, en de Verenigde Staten hebben sancties ingesteld. Dit zou de werkzaamheden van het hof kunnen beschadigen of zelfs stilleggen, onder meer omdat het hof mogelijk geen of beperkte toegang heeft tot financiële dienstverlening. Op dit moment zijn er uitsluitend sancties opgelegd tegen een hoofdaanklager vanwege de arrestatiebevelen van het Hof tegen de Israëlische premier en voormalig minister van Defensie. Een verdere invulling van de sanctielijst is op termijn echter reëel. De Amerikaanse sancties kunnen op termijn diepgaande consequenties hebben voor het functioneren van het hof, en daarmee voor de vervolging en berechting van personen die verdacht worden van het plegen van internationale misdrijven, zoals genocide, misdaden tegen de menselijkheid of oorlogsmisdrijven. Ook zijn de hoven voor een groot aantal landen een interessant doelwit van spionage en ondermijnende beïnvloeding, omdat hun onderdanen aldaar berecht kunnen worden.
@hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz Could you fix the editorialized title, please? (Note from the mod.)
Nah, the thing with Merz is that he more-or-less transparently lied during the campaign, brought in multiple lobbyists as minister, brought in multiple politicians with previous corruption scandals as minister/party whip and now these people are behaving exactly as you think they would. They’re trying to do Trump light, and unfortunately they’re not totally unsuccessful in that.
Externally, Merz is making pointlessly macho announcements to other countries (and is then often not following up, e.g. along with Macron, he gave an ultimatum for a ceasefire to Putin … which just passed and was never heard of again). Domestically, Merz continues verbally beating up the poorest while investigating tax cuts for the richest. Dobrindt is making inhumanity and inefficiency at the border cool again, in the process fucking up relations to neighboring countries like Poland. Reiche is evaluating how to fuck solar and wind power to be able to import more fossil gas. Schnieder is investigating how to fuck the cheap-ish national train ticket while making fossil-powered cars and flights cheaper. Now-party whip Spahn, whose corruption led to somewhere between 2.5 and 10bn€ being lost on FFP2 masks since 2021, is tirelessly repeating that he is being prosecuted for nothing and feels zero guilt. And in the past few days, the CxU parliamentary group prevented the election of a constitutional judge because of a right-wing campaign cooking up a bunch of lies about her.
That’s a lot of shit, especially given they’re just 70 days in office.
Gawds, slam me with the thang!
THE Capitalization IS very Random and i feel that adds To an Aura Of AUTHORITY.
@dumnezero@piefed.social Could you update the link to the original article at https://www.spiegel.de/a-0d1883d9-b7dd-4e5e-a6f4-a3069b13b4dd asap please?
English translation below
Spiegel article, DeepL translation
The legacy of reunification
“First an exhilarating awakening, then a radical fall”
**Victory of freedom or hostile takeover - East Germans look back on reunification in very different ways. Why is that? Sociologist Alexander Leistner has some explanations. **
SPIEGEL: Some East Germans see the fall of communism in the GDR in 1989 as a peaceful revolution and a victory for freedom. In retrospect, another part views the change as a defeat and even sees the reunification as a hostile takeover of East Germany by the West. Where does this great contrast come from?
Leistner: These are two highly condensed narratives about enormously complex events. They make history more tangible, but they also partly reflect individual experiences. Even in the 1990s, negative terms such as crisis, bankruptcy and even colonization emerged in connection with the reunification, including those of people whose livelihoods were damaged by reunification. Whereby negative images - as Pegida has shown - are not necessarily represented by those who lost out during the reunification.
SPIEGEL: Does the emotional impact of the events of that time shape the interpretation?
Leistner: Yes. Many members of the opposition in the GDR, for example, first experienced 1989 as an almost intoxicating awakening, an attempt to change the GDR - and then, from the fall onwards, as a radical fall into insignificance, because there was a lack of resonance for their ideas among the population. Many members of the opposition and their ideas were basically overrun by the East Germans’ desire for prosperity and freedom.
SPIEGEL: The majority of East Germans were not active members of the opposition. How did they experience the fall of communism?
Leistner: Millions of people were affected by the collapse of the East German economy and the loss of their jobs. Added to this was the degradation of many working women to housewives, the disposal of parts of the East German intelligentsia, the loneliness of the SED victims and other fates. For many people, the social awakening and democratic liberation were coupled with enormous disappointment and great uncertainty. These were sometimes shocking experiences that affected almost every family in East Germany.
SPIEGEL: Did people feel threatened by the changes?
Leistner: Many people certainly didn’t experience reunification as a reunification on an equal footing. Artists, for example - writers, actors, musicians - had to experience that their work was suddenly hardly appreciated anymore.
SPIEGEL: Were many people hoping for a revolution in 1989, for freedom and consumption, but at the same time wished that their professional and social lives would remain unchanged?
Leistner: You could say that. But you always have to be aware of the enormous dynamics of the development: In the summer of 1989, no one could have foreseen the collapse of the GDR. The collapse came completely out of the blue, and as a result there was a kind of surplus of the most diverse hopes.
SPIEGEL: Including the hope that the break would not be too great?
Leistner: Yes. Populist expectations of prosperity also played a role here, such as the slogan of the “blossoming landscapes” of the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, that quickly proved to be an illusion.
SPIEGEL: Why do many people still find it difficult to understand the fall of communism in 1989 as a complex historical process that cannot be explained in simple terms?
Leistner: Simplistic narratives can be misleading, also in terms of remembrance politics. In reunified Germany, efforts are still being made to overload 1989 as an identity-forming moment. In speeches and exhibitions in the public debate about the GDR, 1989 is perceived as an act of self-liberation and as a completed process. This is an extremely shortened narrative, because for many people it was not always a success story, nor was it complete. The individual biographical catastrophes that the collapse of the GDR led to were not acknowledged for a long time, and in some cases were even stigmatized. Charred wreck of a Trabi (1990): “Sometimes shocking experiences”
SPIEGEL: What effect did that have?
Leistner: It created a lot of defiance among the people, recently a negative pride among the unadjusted, as well as great criticism of the dominance of West German elites and their perspectives.
SPIEGEL: And this defiance reinforced a one-sided view of the reunification?
Leistner: Yes. People who criticize reunification often still have the feeling that social change came upon them without them being able to help shape it. That’s why today, if you simplify it, there are two opposing points of view: reunification as a success story and the malicious takeover of the East by the West - basically a new beginning and a demolition version of reunification.
SPIEGEL: Has the tendency to perceive reunification as an annexation increased in recent years?
Leistner: At least among some people, right up to the absurd equation of the SED dictatorship with Merkel’s alleged dictatorship in right-wing circles.
SPIEGEL: What mistakes were made in the West?
Leistner: What many West Germans still fail to recognize today: Very little has changed in the West as a result of reunification, whereas almost everything has changed in the East. As a result of this disparity, there are completely different memories between the West and the East.
SPIEGEL: Are right-wing circles in East Germany consciously picking up on that?
Leistner: Yes. Although the AfD in East Germany, for example, is not only appealing to the victim role of East Germans, but rather trying to appeal to East German self-confidence and even present East Germany as the better Germany. It’s almost tragic - basically, it was only the AfD’s electoral successes in East Germany that led to more attention being paid to East German history after 1989.
SPIEGEL: What would have to change for the fall of communism to become a common date in German history and not remain a divisive event between East and West for many people?
Leistner: The empathetic West German view is still missing, there is a lack of understanding to recognize that the first experiences with West German democratic society were not only positive for many East Germans. Many people in the West still do not understand the shock of the almost lightning-fast transformation that hit the East Germans. To this day, however, accusations of ingratitude can still be heard in the West against the East Germans.
So, first, it’s at least a little interesting that you say nothing about EU sanctions against China in your response. That’s the one concrete point from my reply which you could have responded to.
No I’m not spreading apathy and I support the communist party of Russia
Funky. Otoh, you were basically saying that German politics is completely determined by corporates. That exact idea is spreading distrust in democratic processes and that is what I mean when talk about spreading apathy.
Please stop doing the fucking Adam Curtis monologue about how Putin is psychically poisoning society
I have no clue who Adam Curtis is. I am sure you know who that is. Rather consistently though in this thread, you seem to suggest things about me and put words in my mouth. Do you consider that good discussion style somehow?
Your country has a problem with Russia because it has nationalized its oil supply
What makes you think that?
West Germany has had a relationship with Russia and its variously nationalized or semi-nationalized oil and gas infrastructure since the early 80s. And Germany has just progressively bought more of the stuff produced there.
One of Germany’s chancellors even went straight from calling Putin a “flawless democrat” to lobbying for Gazprom. The German political system could never get its hands on enough Russian gas—even after Russia attacked a country that neighbors the EU in 2014. German politicians watched people in Poland freak out about Russia’s imperial potential for close to a decade and didn’t think anything of it. Germany literally allowed Gazprom to buy its national gas storage. That last bit is actually completely insane, even if the buyer of said storage hadn’t been an autocratic nation.
Russia only became an issue to Germany, when it launched a full-scale attack on said country neighboring the EU.
This isn’t a pissing match between countries
I believe it is a war.
this is about neocolonialism and Germany’s leadership is fighting for its place within that system
Russia is not a colony, and it never was. Post-1990, Russia was largely just left to its own devices which you can certainly criticize as being unfair but I honestly don’t know what you get out of throwing the term colonialism around in this context.
Honestly, this is such a warped view of reality. Germany is quite sure where it stands overall, as a defining part of the EU, amidst Western nations. To me, it seems post-1990 Russia never was so sure of its identity. Now the official goal appears to be filling that void with imperialist ambition. Russia being geographically large and geographically “close” to Germany does not really figure into the equation of political/economic/mental closeness though.
It’s China.
And in practice, does the EU sanction China to any relevant degree right now? Afaik, there are some tame EV sanctions, and some provisions against too much low-value shit originally destined for the US being rerouted to the EU. Not much else.
Germany cannot do any of the things you are proposing because it is not even politicians who make these decisions, it is investors
Cool cool cool. However, if German politicians actually want something, they can be remarkably effective at pushing things through. That a large number of them are apparently easily corruptible does not mean that incumbent industries deciding industrial policy is some kind of axiom here. Incidentally, and I know—you don’t like elections, while our former minister for economy from the Greens was way too centrist and clearly also did listen to lobby bullshit, since we have a gonservative minister for economy, policy has actually changed quite a bit. Or, like, right at this moment, there are completely pointless, cruel, and illegal border checks that also massively hurt industry through traffic jams at German borders—and yet, this practice is continuing.
All you’re doing then is spreading is apathy—and that tactic is remarkably in line with propaganda from the country you’re defending all the time.
We’re talking about the industrial capacity required for a green revolution, though! Aside from energy prices, that requires maintaining a stable talent pool of engineers, many different kinds of skilled workers! Just massacring the whole gas car industry isn’t even a good idea for that sake.
Germany is fucking up on that front. But, fwiw, I never said, industries should be “massacred” — though granted, at this point, they are massacring themselves. Those German car sales in China are not coming back. And the anti-EV propaganda has worked wonders on the German public.
But to a large degree that’s a result of Germany putting cart before horse: The industrial incumbents run industrial policy. And the incumbents want their existing business model to be stable until the next quarter. They also have a distinct lack of interest in science or innovation.
We had German car execs deciding that subsidies should go into diesel cars, and federal research budgets should be spent on hydrogen cars without first researching whether hydrogen cars make any sense.
We had coal people lobby to keep the already-trundling German coal industry alive, at the expense of the less well-connected solar industry that employed 5x as many people as coal.
Incidentally, Japan went the same route. Some dude at Toyota apparently decided that Japan should ignore its leadership in Li-ion laptop batteries because surely hydrogen made from imported Australian coal is the future of transportation !!
China went the opposite route: They listened to scientists, they prioritized energy autarky and increasing the size of the middle class. And then the state set industrial policy based on that.
I read a pop science article about heat pumps
How solipsistic bro
So, another fake quote and a snarky comment. That’s not much of an argument, or is it? What are you trying to say?
you can’t then sanction the main manufacturer of green tech
So Russia is the biggest producer of clean tech? I did not know that. /s
I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me in the first paragraph, sorry. Sure, fossil energy prices went up since Russia started a war. They did go down again too, though, but perhaps not to 2019 levels.
And sure, there are things that may be in Russia’s best interest. But are we really hoping that the weirdo who is in charge there will pursue them? Especially now, post-Covid isolation which apparently increased his imperial ambition. And no, I don’t want to be in a Russian-dominated economic zone between “Lisbon and Vladivostok”; that sounds like societal regression.
I find it hard to believe that people wouldn’t look then.