I despise political violence. I despise it because I know where it leads, which is with all sides ‘tooling up’ to deal with real or imagined threats from their opponents. Political violence is the very antithesis of the democratic ideal and can also help to destroy what democracy a nation has. The use of political violence by both the Left and the Right helped to weaken the post WWI German Weimar Republic and usher in both the destruction wrought on Germany by Hitler, but also the division of that nation for nearly half a century. Elsewhere, Irish Republican violence in the United Kingdom, helped to usher in a much more oppressive and all encompassing security state than Britain had hitherto had in peacetime.
Because I abhor political violence I have to condemn it whatever side it comes from. Political violence very rarely solves problems in democratic societies but can often make things worse. The attack on a German parliamentarian member of the anti migration Alternative for Germany party (AFD) is especially worthy of condemnation. It is the sort of attack that I would have no hesitation in condemning no matter what side of the political aisle it has come from.
This attack on the chair of the Bremen branch of the AFD, Frank Magnitz, is a very serious one and it is one for which the blame can be more than likely laid at the feet of Germany’s far Left and its allies. This is not I’m afraid, an attack that surprises me. The far Left across many different countries has been getting more and more violent over the years and we have seen outbreaks of Leftist inspired violence not just in Germany but also in the United States and the United Kingdom as well. This propensity for violence has always been there on the Left for as long as I can remember. I’ve lost count over the years of lefties who believe that with just one more violent revolution the nirvana of a socialist utopia could be achieved. I recall that when I myself identified with the Left, even the most genteel of CND marches attracted the plastic Bolshevik revolutionaries and the anarchists shouting ‘Bombs not jobs’. Although all extremes of political thought can produce violent thugs, the Left seem to have produced them with a remarkable consistency.
The Guido Fawkes site reporting on this horrific attack said:
German MP Frank Magnitz, leader of the right-wing populist nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland in the state of Bremen, was brutally attacked by masked men with a piece of wood as he left a drinks reception in an art museum last night. He was beaten unconscious and kicked in the head.
An AfD spokesperson has stated that “The police officers and the Bremen prosecutor are investigating because the act has been politically motivated.”
I think that taking into account the target of this attack it is an almost dead cert that this attack is politically motivated. I would be extremely unsurprised to find out sometime in the future that there was Antifa involvement in this attack, this sort of thing is after all their style. I hope that the German police take this attack seriously and the courts deal appropriately with the perpetrators because the very last thing that Germany or any other democratic nation needs at the moment is a spiral of political violence. I would like to take this opportunity to call for all sensible Lefties out there (and I know there are a few) to disassociate themselves from the violent thugs of Antifa and similar groups. This is because these groups will achieve little except encouraging hotheads from the other side to respond to violence with violence and that will make the current problems with political violence several orders of magnitude more worse than it is at present. I know the Left has a propensity for violence issue, I’ve been a Lefty myself and have seen how the romantic fantasy of the revolutionary freedom fighter can take hold of some individuals on the Left and lead them towards violence. It is now time for the Left to call out and condemn the violence and idiocy from their side just as willingly and as strongly as those of us who are on the conservative side of politics disavow our own violent extremists.
